


His Heart Is a Place of Safety

by BeaArthurPendragon



Series: The Devil's Afterlife [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Iron Fist (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Luke Cage (TV), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Defenders (Marvel TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Ableism, Adult Peter Parker, Alcohol Abuse, Also Some Explicit Sex, Bad Decisions, Bisexual Matt Murdock, Bisexuality, Brief suicidal ideation, Canonical Character Death, Catholicism, Coming Out, Depression, Disability, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gay, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, I Hope You Laugh Too, If You Blink You'll Miss The Wade Wilson Cameo, Long, Love, M/M, Recovery, Slow Burn, You might cry, all the feels, spideydevil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 00:52:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 48,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15377127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaArthurPendragon/pseuds/BeaArthurPendragon
Summary: After an anti-mutant terrorist organization deals a devastating blow to the Defenders and the Avengers have to step in, Matt Murdock, (adult) Peter Parker, and their friends struggle to adapt to a new, very different reality. All the feelings ensue. (Also, sex.)





	1. Get Up, Matty

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, and welcome to my first-ever fanfic! This is a longer work, novella-length, so I hope you'll hang in till the end.
> 
> I wanted to play around with the idea that everybody's getting a little older now, so Peter's in his late 20's and Matt is in his (gasp) early 40's. (Don't worry, kids, 40 ain't that old anymore.) Matt's backstory hews pretty true to seasons 1 and 2 of Daredevil and the Defenders. Peter's backstory is different--I wanted to play with a version of him who became a photographer instead of an engineer. ALSO: This basically ignores Infinity War. 
> 
> Much of my understanding of Matt's blindness was inspired by this excellent [New York Times Op-Doc](https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000002653284/notes-on-blindness.html) on theologian John Hull's diaries as well as a bunch of other reading. That said, if I've misstepped anywhere, I humbly accept feedback.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt wakes up to a nightmare.

**June, 2018**

He surfaced into a fog of pain, ears ringing, limbs numb and impossibly heavy, lungs struggling to exchange enough oxygen for him to cling to consciousness, nausea threatening to swamp him with every breath. Every nerve in his body felt like it was sizzling with electricity, drowning out nearly every other sensation. He tried to flutter his eyes open and failed. He was dying.

_Get up, Matty,_ his father said. _Get up._

His eyes felt gummed shut but he slowly turned his face toward the voice coming from his right side and managed a little grunt of acknowledgement.

“Welcome back to the living.”

It took him a minute to recognize Frank’s voice, and another to realize he had no idea where they were. A bed, on a boat maybe, or was that just vertigo? He tried to ask, but only managed an inquisitive wheeze. He didn’t have the strength to cough his throat clear.

“Don’t try to talk, Red,” Frank said. “You’re safe. Claire’s here.”

He nodded, eyes still closed, and slid his hand up his stomach to his chest and noted the bandages binding his ribs, the aching swell of a dislocated shoulder. Dragged his hand further up to his face, noting a thick cut trailing from his jaw to his ear, frailed with stitches and gummy with antibiotic gel, the tender hollow of a missing upper molar, the bristly shadow of a beard. A headache crushed all around him like a vise.

“Mm,” he managed.

He knew there was more he wanted to ask, more he needed to know, but it could wait. He was hurt but he was alive. Claire was here. It was enough for now.

He slept.

* * *

Elusive beads of memory scattering and pooling like spilled mercury into distinct recollections….

An online comment from “Hominus” on a Bulletin retrospective on the 15th anniversary of the Battle for New York, saying the Sokovia Accords had not gone far enough, that powered people didn’t just need to be tracked, they needed to be contained…

Later that week, on an unrelated story about construction delays on the 2nd Avenue subway, he wrote that they needed to be sterilized, they needed to be neutralized….

Two weeks later, commenting on a recap of a Mets game, a long, dizzying digression into epigenetic theory and novel histone reactions…

On a recipe for lavender honey ice cream, that superpowers were mortal threats to God and family and the free market….

On a report about a budget shortfall at the Port Authority: _Humanity comes first, must always come first…._

Finally, posted on a Sunday featured wedding, the comment that got Pete called upstate: _I have synthesized the cure that will cleanse us once and for all…_

A call from Jess about an IP address that led to a recently abandoned apartment in Staten Island….

In the trash, an address in a mostly abandoned industrial part of Queens that turned out to be a small neon sign factory….

Through the window, a small lab and three dozen 100-gallon tanks that were definitely not full of neon….

_Time to get the band back together again, Murdock_ , she’d said…

Running silently up through the alley, slipping in through an easily-jimmied basement door, Jess then Luke then Danny then Trish then Matt, Frank on the roof next door with his sniper rifle as a last resort….

And then he remembered nothing.

* * *

Sometime later, he wasn’t sure how long, he emerged again, this time managing to open his eyes, for all the good it did. He still couldn’t place where he was, exactly, but the bed had stopped moving—so a room, then. There was hospital equipment—he could hear a heart monitor and feel the itchy ache of an IV needle in his arm, but it didn’t smell like a hospital. He was not home, either, but when he reached out with his senses, nothing about the room resolved into enough focus for him to identify it.

“Good morning.” His ears were still ringing and it took a moment to place the voice as Claire’s. “How are you feeling?”

Matt cleared his throat and winced. “Dizzy. Headache.”

She moved closer to the bed. “How’s your pain otherwise?”

The cut on his face itched, his missing tooth throbbed and his shoulder ached to the bone, but he could breathe better and the electrical wildfire that had coursed through his nerves earlier had subsided to a steady sizzle, so he counted it a win. He even managed a minute shrug and an even more minute smile. “Been worse.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said, pushing his hair back from his brow to check his temperature. “But I think you’ll live.”

He didn’t have the strength to argue. “Where am I?”

“Frank and Karen’s.”

That’s why it seemed familiar. Frank lived in an old piano warehouse in the South Bronx—purchased with the cash Frank had received, along with his new name and passport, from DHS a dozen years back after the Cerberus affair. Over the years Frank had turned the second-floor office space into a respectable loft with a full kitchen and a couple of bedrooms, though it wasn’t until Karen moved in that it was furnished to any degree of comfort.

Though there was little comfort in the fact that Karen lived with Frank at all. He and Matt had come to a wary détente a decade ago, after Frank saved his life on a Hell’s Kitchen rooftop surrounded by more Hand soldiers than Matt could ever hope to take on alone. But that truce had come on the condition that he stay away from Hell’s Kitchen and a promise that if Frank accidentally killed a civilian, Matt was going to come for him.

Frank had never broken his word to Matt. Still, trust didn’t come until much later, when Karen began seeing him and Matt had to come to terms with it. So he followed Frank for months, observing his methods, tracking his kills, trying to work out the moral logic of his missions. There was a pattern, Matt realized. Frank only killed the shotcallers—the capos and the lieutenants and consiglieres. The teenage soldiers, the corner boys, the women forced to mule drugs and serve men with the power to kill them—he never touched them. Decapitation was his game, not decimation.

As murderers went, Frank was at least a principled one, and though Matt would never condone what he did, he could at least recognize that he could trust Frank without reservation--with his life, and with Karen’s. As Frank became more and more a part of Karen’s life, he became more a part of Matt’s, and eventually their détente began to give way to an uneasy, improbable friendship.

“Why am I here? What happened?”

“You got gassed. A low dose, but you’ve been out for almost a week. You’re lucky you woke up at all.”

“A week? Is everyone else okay?”

“You don’t have to worry about anyone else but yourself right now,” Claire said. “I need to see what this shit did to you.”

Matt nodded.

“Take my hands and give them a good squeeze,” she said.

Matt reached forward, his brow quickly furrowing when he realized he could not locate Claire’s hands. “I’m sorry, I can’t—"

“You can’t tell where they are?”

“No.”

“Matt, it’s okay,” Claire said quickly, taking his hands in hers. “You just woke up from a coma.”

Matt nodded, and she squeezed his hands. “Squeeze back,” she said. He did, and she winced. “I didn’t say break my hands,” she said with a laugh.

Matt scowled.

“Hey, Matt, this is good news, okay?”

But Matt just shook his head.

Claire began methodically pushing and prodding his arms and legs, testing their strength, checking his reflexes, making sure nothing was paralyzed. He could swallow a sip of water. He knew what year it was, who was president, his middle name, his birthday, and his address. He could tell left from right and up from down. He could touch his nose, clap his hands, multiply 7 by 5 and count backwards from 100 by 8’s, spell ‘banana’ and ‘Mississippi.’

“Now that I’ve proved that I graduated from 4th grade, will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Hang on a sec.” She sounded tired, suddenly, and something else he couldn’t place.

The door creaked and suddenly Frank and Karen were in the room and they were whispering but his ears were ringing too much for him to catch their words. He could tell Karen was becoming upset, and though she was still whispering her voice rose just enough to snap into focus. “We have to tell him.”

Anxiety began to boil up through Matt’s chest. “Did we fail, Frank? Did he get away?”

“There was an explosion,” Frank said. “It was a trap—there was a gas tank rigged to blow. He was never there. We didn’t want him to know there were any survivors so we brought you here.”

“What do you mean, survivors?”

Frank didn’t answer. Then Karen sat on the bed next to him and took his hand and he knew he was the last Defender left.

“No,” Matt said. Suddenly the bed was intolerable—he had to stand up, he couldn’t accept this lying down—and he tried to get up, but Karen pushed her hands against his shoulders to keep him in bed.

“Don’t, Matt—you’re going to hurt yourself,” Karen said, panicking a little. “Frank, help me.”

Frank stepped in and anchored Matt to the bed easily until he stopped struggling. Karen climbed over him and sat in the bed next to him, threading her arm behind his shoulders, pulling him close and kissing his temple.

“It was over before they knew it,” Frank said. “I found you in a freight elevator. That metal box probably saved your life.”

“Where are they now?”

“Misty and Colleen took them upstate to the Avengers compound for autopsies,” Claire said. “SHIELD shut down my clinic until we catch this guy, so that’s the only place we could take them. But we didn’t think you’d survive the trip, so we grabbed everything we could carry from the clinic and set up an ICU for you right here.”

Matt nodded as if any of that mattered to him right now. There was only one thing that did: “I want to talk to Peter.”

Karen dialed her phone and placed it into Matt’s hand and then cleared the room so he could speak privately.

“Karen? How is he?” Even through the phone, Matt could hear how exhausted he was.

“Lousy,” he said.

“Oh, hey babe,” Pete’s voice cracked a little and he paused a moment before speaking again. “It’s really good to hear your voice.”

“Same.” Matt’s fingers were so tingly and clumsy he could barely hold the phone, so he tucked it between his cheek and shoulder. “When can you get here?”

He was too tired to obscure the plea in his voice. He wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around Pete’s chest, breathe in the scent of his neck and his hair, and feel their hearts beating against each other’s again.

Peter paused before answering. “Hominus is still out there.”

Matt nodded, afraid that was what he’d say. “Your guys taking this one over?”

“There’s no one else left to.”

“I know.” Matt exhaled raggedly. “I really fucked up, Pete. I failed them--”

“No you didn’t,” Pete said. “We chose this life—you, me, Jess, Luke, Danny, Trish—we all knew what the risks were.”

“But I should have realized no one was there, I should have smelled the explosives—"

“It’s not your fault, Matty,” Pete said softly. “This is all on Hominus. Not you.”

“You can’t go after him. Let the humans take care of him. He’ll kill you but he might not kill them.”

Peter was quiet for a minute. “He’s got a fucking militia, Matt. At least a hundred, maybe two, all hunkered down in a compound near the Canadian border. It’s going to take all of us to clear this nest. We’re even bringing in SHIELD commandos.”

“When?”

“TBD,” Pete said. “We don’t want another Waco on our hands so we have to figure out how to sneak in, but they’ve cleared the trees for a mile in every direction. Right now we’re looking into the feasibility of tunneling in and catching them by surprise in the middle of the night, but that mountain is made of solid granite, so we’re trying to figure out how to do it without blasting.”

“That could take weeks,” Matt said.

“Months,” Peter said. “I’m so sorry, Matt. I hate that I can’t be there with you.”

“You just come home to me, Peter Parker. Do you understand?”

“I know. I’ll do my best.”

“Promise me.”

Peter was silent. Not once in three years had they ever made this promise. It was the job, and they both knew it.

“I love you,” he said instead. “You concentrate on getting better. I’ll call when I can, okay? I love you.”

“I love you too,” Matt said.

“I have to go now,” Pete said softly. “Bye, love.”

“Be careful. I love you.”

Matt hung up the phone and held it to his chest. He wasn’t okay, but he wasn’t about to tell Pete that. “I’ll call when I can” meant it was time for mission protocol: No distractions, and good news only till it’s over. Even if he had to lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I hope you're enjoying so far. As a fanfic noob (and a Rather Old One At That) I welcome your comments and kudos, because of course I'm a sucker for approval, especially from the cool kids like you. I have a Tumblr that I don't entirely know how to use at [beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/) but I think I've set it up properly to ask questions, so ask away!


	2. Well, Hello Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Matt recovers, he begins to reflect on his relationship with Peter.

**November 2014**

After Matt put Kingpin away for the last time, New York Magazine called to tell him they wanted to include him in their annual 25 New Yorkers Who Made a Difference This Year section that ran on the last week of the year.

Matt had had his fill of publicity already—the trial had been carried live on NY1—but Karen had persuaded him it would be good for business, so on a freezing Saturday at the end of November, sporting a fresh haircut and his best suit, he met Peter Parker at his office.

“Mr. Murdock, I’m Peter,” he’d said, and before his hand had even clasped around Matt’s, Matt realized they’d met before. 

It was late March at the Red Hook shipping terminal. Daredevil was checking out a lead on how Madame Gao was getting heroin into the country. Spider-Man was looking for a crooked port manager who was falsifying bills of lading and container weights, and it turned out they were looking for the same guy.

Matt had never really forgiven the Avengers for how much trouble they seemed to attract to the city, but it was foolish to refuse the assist on this one.

To his surprise, Matt had taken an instant liking to Spidey. It was all too easy for Matt, dealing every night with the lowest of the low, to lose faith in the entire human enterprise and wonder why God ever gave the world a second chance after the flood—but Spidey appeared to be goodness personified, quick with a joke, and relentlessly optimistic. And Matt was certain he was the only Avenger who loved New York as much as he did.

So much that, once he understood what Matt was looking for, he let Matt take the collar so he could question the port manager before dropping him off with the police.

Matt hadn’t seen Spidey since, nor had he expected to cross paths with him again—and certainly not in civilian life.

“Call me Matt, please” he said, closing his other hand around Parker’s and finding himself unexpectedly and utterly flustered. There was a strange energy pulsing through Parker that Matt had never encountered before—a compact, almost atomic vibration that positively thrummed with power. It must be the source of Parker’s mutation, Matt thought, and wondered if he had it as well. If so, the gig was already up.

But he barely had time to consider that thought because he realized there was something else in Parker’s touch, something instinctive and familiar and a little frightening that he couldn’t quite name. He was suddenly afraid he was holding Parker’s hand too tightly, or for too long, and he let go and gestured vaguely toward the coat tree. “You can put your things there.”

As Parker shed his wool peacoat and unwound the scarf from his neck with one graceful swoop, Matt was walloped by the memory of the strikingly balletic quality of movement that he had so envied in Spidey. Years of boxing and martial arts had made Matt pretty light on his feet for a man his size, but that was nothing compared to the weightlessness of Spidey’s steps or the liquid precision of his leaps.

Parker was younger than Matt had expected him to be, 25 or 26. At most a youthful 30. Regardless, Matt had turned 40 that year, which made Parker seem like a kid. Suddenly Matt was flooded with questions that he’d never cared about before: What color were his eyes? His hair? Did he have freckles? Tattoos? And other questions, too—questions he rapidly batted away before they could fully form in his mind, lest they distract him from the job at hand.

Because most of the time he could get away with just enough blind behaviors to trigger whatever preexisting stereotype the person he was dealing with had about him, but he knew Parker would be different. He noticed things for a living and would notice right away if Matt did anything that couldn’t be explained.

 _Game on, then._ Matt smiled to himself. _This could be fun._

Parker slung his camera bag back over his shoulder and grinned as he turned back to Matt.  “Miss Page said your office has a great view of Hell’s Kitchen, so maybe we could start in there?”

They moved into the office and Matt began to raise the shades. “I don’t know how clean the windows are,” he said, because he’d learned long ago that the easiest way to keep someone on their back foot was to remind them that he was blind, and Parker was someone he wanted to keep off balance.

He turned his head slightly toward Parker as he spoke and could tell Parker was watching him closely, observing the way he moved around the room.

“Before we get started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what an ordinary day is like here. What are things you might be doing in the course of your job?”

“I don’t specialize in one area of law, so very day’s different,” Matt said. “I meet with clients, here or in jail, take depositions, do a lot of research, fill out a lot of paperwork, write a lot of briefs and memos and letters. Two-thirds of my business are civil claims—divorces, evictions, business disputes, discrimination, personal injury—and most of those cases get settled over a conference table before they ever go before a judge. Even when I have to go to court it’s usually pretty routine. It’s not all that dramatic, to be honest.”

“The Fisk trial was,” Parker said. “I watched your cross examination on NY1. I couldn’t look away.”

“Right, but that wasn’t my trial. I was just a witness.”

“The star witness. It was your testimony that put him away.”

“My evidence was valuable to the DA,” Matt allowed. “All I did was explain to the court what I’d found.”

“Well, I thought it was incredibly brave,” Parker said, shaking his head. “God, imagine if he’d gotten off?”

Matt turned toward Parker and shrugged. “You probably wouldn’t be taking my picture today.”

Parker was quiet for a minute, and Matt was wondering if he was trying to decide whether he meant he simply wouldn’t have become famous enough to feature in the magazine or wouldn’t be alive enough to accept the honor. But then Parker lifted his camera.

“Don’t move,” he said, clicking the shutter.

Over the next half-hour Parker put him through a series of poses, all of which felt ludicrously stagy but which Parker assured him would look just fine on the page. Crossed arms, sitting at his desk, sitting on the edge of his desk, standing over the desk with his fingertips resting on a page of braille, as if he had simply paused to review a point of law during a conversation.

Parker was good at his job, Matt noticed, maintaining a light, bubbly conversation the entire time, periodically doling out what Matt suspected were stock anecdotes about his own life designed to put his subjects at ease. He reminded Matt in some ways of Foggy, who had followed Marcie to D.C. earlier that year to open Hogarth, Benowitz and Chow’s new K Street office. Foggy had always been an expert small-talker.

It worked. Matt learned that Parker had started out as a photo intern for the Bugle during high school but now he mostly did freelance magazine work with some art photography on the side, and yes, he did sometimes show at galleries downtown. “But the magazine work can be fun, too—especially when I get to do travel spreads,” he said. “I basically get paid to sightsee. How can you say no to that, right?” However, Matt noted with interest, Parker’s heartbeat told a somewhat different story. _You don’t travel for work at all, do you? At least not with a camera._

His family had convinced him to get an engineering degree just in case the starving artist thing didn’t work out but all he used it for was to restore antique cameras. Parker, in no particular order, was a connoisseur of energy drinks and food trucks, a ride-or-die Mets fan, collected DC comics, owned a calico cat named Steve, and had never learned how to drive.

“Don’t feel bad—neither did I,” Matt said, but by now, Parker was no longer flustered around him. _Damn_.

“Have you always been blind?” he asked, clicking the shutter.

“No.”

Parker said nothing. Matt realized he was doing something he himself often did when he interviewed a witness—saying nothing until the silence grew so uncomfortable that the witness began to fill it with words, often revealing ones. He knew the scars from the chemical burns he’d suffered on his face as a child had faded quite a bit, but they were still visible in the right light to someone who looked closely. Parker, he knew, had been looking closely for quite a while, and perhaps the light was right. But Matt was not interested in obliging him. Not yet.

So. “DC Comics. Batman or Superman?” he asked instead.

“Team Supe, all the way.” _Of course he was. He even worked at a newspaper._ “I was weird artsy kid, didn’t really fit in. He was an alien and I felt like one. I liked knowing that you could be different and still be good.”

Parker’s heartbeat had picked up a notch—this was something he wasn’t used to sharing. Matt was unexpectedly moved by this. “I was always more of a Batman guy, myself,” he allowed, though he didn’t usually invite conversation about the sighted part of his life with strangers.

“What’d you like about him?” Parker asked, taking another photo.

“Oh, I liked that he took what scared him most in the world—bats—and made it his power,” Matt said, realizing that the only other person he’d ever told this to was Foggy. He knew he could trust Spidey with this, though. “I was an easy kid to pick on. I liked the idea of turning fear into strength.”

“That must have served you well during the Fisk trial,” Parker said.

“I suppose it did.”

Parker wanted one more photo by the window. The sun had gone down, he said (Matt knew—the temperature had dropped a quarter of a degree), and Hell’s Kitchen was lit up like a Christmas tree behind him (Matt knew that too—the streetlights always generated a distinct electric hum at night).

“Let’s do something a little different. I have an idea,” Parker said. He asked Matt to stand next to the window, facing it at an angle. “Are you open to taking off your glasses?”

“No.” The more delicate skin around his eyes had not healed as well as his nose and cheeks had; the scarring was heavier, and his eyelashes had never grown back. He’d been fitted with a pair of very convincing prosthetic eyes, but they could neither track nor focus, and he’d always worried they would be unnerving to anyone who wasn’t used to them.

“Okay, that’s fine. In that case--” Parker came close enough to touch him. Matt concentrated on keeping his breath steady, sure that at any moment Parker would recognize him, and the gig would be up. “Do you mind if I move you a tiny bit? I’m getting a bit of glare off your glasses.”

“Okay.”

Parker put his hands—Matt could feel their strength--on Matt’s shoulders and turned him about two degrees to the right, then put his finger against Matt’s chin to guide his gaze back into place. Parker’s heartbeat quickened when he touched Matt’s face. _Shit. He has to know._ Against his will, Matt found himself smiling nervously against Parker’s hand.

“He smiles at last,” Parker said, smiling back. “I like that. Now don’t move.”

He took about half a dozen shots of that pose, and they were done.

“You did great,” Parker said, taking the hand Matt offered. “It was a pleasure meeting you. I’ll send the proofs to Miss Page by the end of the week, if not sooner.”

When Matt closed the door behind Parker, he locked the door, then paused and took a deep breath. He reached over to the coat tree and closed his fingers around Parker’s woolen scarf. Then he released it, let himself out, and tried to forget about it for the rest of the weekend.

* * *

  **June 2018**

Eventually he realized that his bladder situation was quickly becoming an emergency. He managed to haul himself upright and swing his legs—they seemed to weigh a hundred pounds apiece—over the side of the bed, but the effort made his head fill with bees and he had to lean forward with his head between his knees until he was reasonably certain he wouldn’t pass out.

He tried to reach out with his senses to scan the wall for the bathroom door that he knew was somewhere to his left, but every nerve in his body was still ringing, jangling, and buzzing too much for him understand anything beyond the radius of his arms.

He cautiously began to put weight on his feet, bit by bit, using the bed’s footboard to boost himself up. That seemed to go better than the sitting-up part, so he cautiously let go of the bed and took one step, then another. He felt like he was not so much walking as lurching, but in any event he made it across the room to the far wall, where it only took a few moments of searching to locate the bathroom door.

The first thing he found was the sink and, with sincere private apologies to Karen, relieved himself there rather than risk pissing himself in the thirty extra seconds it would take to find the toilet and line up with it.

After rinsing out the sink with fresh water as best as he could, he realized that he could hear Frank moving around in the living area. Eager to take a break from his sickroom, he made his way to the bedroom door.

“What time is it?” he paused in the doorway, his hand gripping the frame to keep the ground from shifting beneath his feet.

“A little after eight,” Frank said. “What are you doing out of bed?”

“Change of scenery,” he said. “Eight in the morning?”

“Yeah.”

Matt nodded. He needed to sit down, and soon, but the loft seemed like little more than a vast void in front of him. “Remind me where you keep the sofa these days.”

“About six, seven feet ahead,” Frank said. “At your two.”

Matt took slow, small, cautious steps, his right hand extended before him. The lurch had subsided into a limp—his ankle was hurting, he realized—and he almost knocked over the side table next to the sofa.

“You okay?” Frank asked.

“Yeah. Just lightheaded,” Matt said, hoping that was the explanation. He found his way to the front of the couch and sank into it heavily.

“You want some food? I was going to make some eggs.”

“Sure.”

Matt leaned back on the sofa and closed his eyes while Frank cooked, scrambling eggs and toasting bread and making coffee. He was humming something that might have been a Springsteen song as he cooked—Frank’s complete domestication at once hilarious to Matt and deeply comforting, as he realized how much Frank had healed with Karen in his life.

Eventually he realized that he and Frank were the only ones home. “Where are the girls?”

“Claire went home to get some sleep. Kay”—his nickname for Karen—"went into the office for a few hours. She’s been farming out your cases to other lawyers, postponing court dates—anything she can do to buy you some time to recover,” Frank said, walking over to the sofa with the food. “Here’s your plate.”

Matt held out his hand, not to reach for the plate but to receive it. He did the same for the fork Frank offered.

“You sure you’re okay, Red?” Frank asked again, as Matt mapped out the food on his plate with the fork before eating.

Matt nodded. “I’m pretty sure I have a concussion,” he said, although he didn’t feel like he did at all. Still, the symptoms had been the similar, so perhaps the cure would be, too. “Puts everything on the fritz. I just need to rest and meditate for a few days.”

He only managed a few bites before nausea set in and he had to lie down on the sofa.

He lay there most of the day, alternately dozing and listening to Frank putter around the loft, doing whatever it was Frank did on a day off—some pushups, he thought, and a little quiet noodling around on the guitar, and he was pretty sure at some point he heard Frank field-stripping his sniper rifle, because Frank never went a day without practicing assembling his weapon.

He didn’t care for Frank’s methods—Matt was not a killer and never would be—but he and Frank had long ago reached a kind of détente and more than once had joined forces in order to protect the city.

Occasionally Frank would rouse him for a few bites of a sandwich or some Gatorade, and sometime around three or four, he began to feel human enough to sit up again and listen to a Women’s World Cup match that Frank wanted to watch.

“I didn’t know you were a women’s soccer fan.”

“Lisa was,” Frank said. Lisa was Frank’s daughter, murdered by the mob in Central Park 15 years before, alongside Frank’s wife Maria, and their younger child, Frank Jr. “The minute she started walking she took off running and never stopped. She didn’t like dance, so we tried soccer. You ever see three-year-olds playing soccer? It’s like a goddamn Buster Keaton movie. Nobody can remember what side they’re on and all they do is chase the ball around. Never failed to crack me up.”

Matt gave a noncommittal laugh. When Frank got on the subject of his kids, it was best just to let him lead.

“She got real good, though. Real good. Her last year, she made the All-Stars team in the 10-to-12’s,” Frank said. “And she schooled me. She was a midfielder, so she was obsessed with Julie Foudy and Brandi Chastain. For her tenth birthday I took her to see Norway play France in Philly. I realized it was the first time she’d ever seen women compete in a big game like that. She said it was the happiest day of her life.”

“I bet.”

“She rooted for France, because they were the underdogs,” Frank said. “That was my girl.”

“She must’ve gotten that from Maria,” Matt said wryly.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Frank agreed. Then, apropos of everything: “Her birthday’s in a couple days. She’d be 25.”

 “I’ll try to get out of your hair before then,” Matt said.

“Nah, I’m glad you’re here,” Frank said suddenly, standing. “Gives me something else to think about. Like how you need to eat.”

* * *

**November 2014**

Parker returned to Matt’s office the following Wednesday to deliver the contact sheets and page proofs and retrieve his scarf. Matt wasn’t there at the time—he taking a deposition across town—but when he got back that afternoon, Karen brought the proofs into his office and wryly observed that Parker had seemed disappointed to miss him.

Matt was, too—he was certain Parker had left his scarf behind on purpose so he’d have an excuse to come back, and Matt could not help but wonder if it was because Parker had figured out—or at least begun to suspect—his alter ego. If so, Matt thought Spidey would probably make a rare appearance in Manhattan that weekend and Matt had patrolled far beyond his usual orbit in Hell’s Kitchen in the hopes of flushing him out. But he hadn’t caught so much as a whisper of him.

He’d told Karen none of this—it wasn’t his secret to tell, and it was a dangerous one in any case. That had led Karen to a different theory about Parker’s interest. “I think he has a little bit of a crush on you, Matt,” she said, paging through the proofs. “Even these photos—I wish you could see them. You look so commanding.”

“You mean I don’t look commanding in real life?”

Karen laughed. “Not like this. He makes you look like…a superhero.”

“I am a superhero.”

“You’re a vigilante,” Karen said primly. “And there’s a mockup of the spread. It’s just dummy copy right now, but the headline’s there—‘The Angel of Hell’s Kitchen.’”

Matt laughed. “Priceless.”

“And,” Karen said, “there’s one more thing. The magazine is throwing a big gala for all the honorees, and they’re going to have the mayor, our congresswoman, the city council, the borough presidents—so I made an appointment for you to get a tux fitted.”

"Do I have to?"

"Yes, it's good for business," Karen said. "Besides, I want an excuse to get dressed up, too."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks! Find me on Tumblr at [beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com).


	3. I Know What You Look Like When You Flirt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt tries out an old skill. Karen touches a nerve.

**June 2018**

Later, when he awoke, the loft was quiet. Matt found some clean clothes and dressed and made his way into the main room.

“Frank?” he called softly. “Karen?” There was no answer. He didn’t know what time it was but the window in his room was warm and he’d heard seagulls outside—so, daytime, then.

Matt made his way toward the kitchen, making note of all the furniture he passed so he would remember where it was next time. He found the fridge and opened it, searching through it until he discovered an apple, a plastic package of deli meat and a cardboard half-gallon of something and placed them on the counter while he hunted for a glass. He couldn’t find one, but there were mugs on the drying rack next to the sink, which would do.

The carton turned out to hold milk and the meat was ham. He ate standing up, alternating bites of apple and ham with sips of milk, surprised to discover how ravenous he was. Still hungry, he found some cereal in a cupboard and ate several handfuls straight from the box like popcorn, then found a jar of peanut butter, swiped out a generous scoop with his finger and ate it in a single bite. He had barely tasted any of it.

It only took a few moments for the food to make him feel better; he was still a little dizzy but the nausea had passed, and his legs weren’t nearly as shaky as they’d been the day before. He went back into the main room but paused in the doorway, uncertain of what he should do next.

He had lied to Frank about the concussion—he was doing much, much worse than he’d been the last time he had one.

He could not remember the last time he had felt so lost in a room; even when he was newly blind and had not yet mastered all the skills he would need to move through the world, there had been a firehose of information pouring into his brain through his enhanced senses that he’d still been able to use in a rough kind of way. And had ever since, he realized—even when he wasn’t trying. For more than 30 years he’d been confidently walking a tightrope without realizing he’d been just six inches from the net the entire time.

Now, that net was just…gone. He struggled to name what he was feeling, a vertiginous sensation of moving through the world in the densest of fogs, with things only becoming real as he moved within arm’s reach of them.

“Get ahold of yourself Murdock,” he murmured out loud, his voice anchoring him in the miasma he found himself lost in. “You know how to do this.” He fell back on the training he’d received in rehab after losing his sight. He worked his way around the room slowly, mapping out the walls, windows, and doors, the curtains and bookcases and picture frames, the fireplace and the entertainment center, a side table there, a wingback chair here, an ottoman and a floor lamp, and then, unexpectedly a piano. He knew it hadn’t been there the last time he’d been here, and he assumed must have come from the leftover stock downstairs.

He had barely played since high school; the nuns had taught him some simple church music, but then Sister Maggie had prevailed upon the diocese to find him a teacher in the hopes that the discipline would siphon some of his anger away; he had so much of his father in him.

He had resisted, of course – how many 12-year-olds like classical music? – but then he discovered he could play Bach.

To hear his instructor play it, it had sounded like little more than math to him—an almost soulless formula of notes and rhythms, joined together by a master technician. It sounded like the musical equivalent of a watch, and he trudged through his exercises without much enthusiasm.

But then, once he had managed to memorize a simple prelude well enough to play it almost without thinking about it, then, for the first time, he felt what made Bach great. Boiling just beneath that prim, mannerly surface was a passion of startling depth, something Matt couldn’t understand but was determined to find the source of.

He moved on to Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin and Debussy and Schubert and Rachmaninoff, but he always loved Bach best. In the end, he had more discipline than talent, and not even boxing gloves could protect his hands enough from the heavy bag Sister Maggie had installed for him in St. Agnes’ basement. Still, he didn’t give it up until he left for college, where there were other passions to distract him.

He opened the piano and played a note. It was in fairly good tune, so he sat down and began to run through his scales. Slowly, the muscles in his hands began to remember what to do, and he played faster and faster, until it felt familiar again. He rummaged through his memory until he located the Well-Tempered Clavier, and began to pick his way through that first prelude in C major he’d learned almost 30 years before.

It was terrible—he struck nearly as many wrong notes than correct ones—but then he tried again and it was still terrible but not quite as bad as before.

He rested his hands on the piano bench and laughed. Then someone clapped across the room behind him.

“Frank?” He turned even though it didn’t do any good anymore. “Have you been here the whole time?”

“It’s me,” Karen said. She yawned, and Matt flushed.

“How early is it?”

“Quarter to six.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt said. “I have no way of telling time right now.”

“It’s nothing a little extra coffee won’t fix,” she said, walking over to him and squeezing his shoulder. “How are you feeling? Still fuzzy?”

“Still fuzzy.”

She made a sympathetic hum and kissed the top of his head. “I had no idea you could do that. Maybe you can teach Frank—he suddenly got a notion to learn a few months ago,” she said with a small laugh. “Midlife crisis, I think.”

While Karen made coffee, Matt found his way to the dining table and sat with his chin resting on his hand, listening to her move around the kitchen. He was struck, suddenly, with a powerful memory of the summer they had lived together nearly a decade ago. Had it really been that long ago?

It had. Karen had spent a year and a half at the Bulletin after the Castle trial, until the financial crisis had forced the paper to lay off nearly a third of its staff in 2007. Things were still chilly between them then, but Matt had not thought twice about offering Karen her old job back—he really needed an extra pair of hands, and there was nobody he trusted with his business as much as her.

She’d driven a hard bargain—he had to pay for her tuition for paralegal classes and she would become a full partner once she graduated. They’d been through too much for her to go back to being his employee.

It was not long after they signed the partnership contract two years later that their considerably improved friendship had begun to feel like something more again. This time things moved more quickly—there were no secrets between them now—and when Karen’s lease came up just a few months later, he invited her to move in.

It lasted eleven months. Unfortunately for them, it was 2010, and few of their clients could afford to pay them, which meant neither one of them could afford to buy the other out. So they’d simply gritted their teeth and pushed through. He’d never regretted it. Neither, he thought, had she.

 Daredevil had largely consumed his life outside work for the next five years; there had been a few women who he’d seen for a month or two, and more than a few for a night or two, but none of them had ever done more than scratch an itch—for sex, mostly, but also for the sweet giddiness of discovering someone new, for those first few weeks when you can still imprint everything you want in a partner on the other person without reality interfering too much. But eventually it did, as it always did—Daredevil always came first.

Until Peter Parker showed up.

* * *

  **December 2014**

On the Tuesday before Christmas, Karen came over to Matt’s after work to get ready for the party. They bustled around the apartment in varying states of undress as comfortably as they had when they lived together, searching for cufflinks, zipping and buttoning each other up, and standing at the kitchen counter eating bananas because dinners at these types of affairs were typically late, lukewarm and awful.

“On the hunt tonight?” Matt said, noting the slim column of silk that slid across her body with an appealing subsonic rush. (Just because they weren’t sleeping together anymore, it didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate her charms.) Now 38, Karen was no longer the skinny, gawky waif Matt had first met in an interview room at the 15th Precinct more than a decade ago, and that, Matt thought, was all for the best. Time and age and a considerable amount of therapy had softened her sharp angles and curved the hard planes of her frame as the trauma of her adolescence receded further into the past. She’d been off drugs for years, she allowed herself to finish her food now, and no longer tacked extra miles onto her morning runs to atone for a few extra drinks.

It wasn’t the extra weight he preferred, though—being unable to perceive the millions of idealized female forms that littered magazines, TV screens and websites had allowed him to develop decidedly omnivorous tastes—but the hard-won peace it represented for her.

“You bet your sweet little ass I am,” Karen said, straightening his tie and patting his chest. “You look like a million bucks, yourself, Matt. You are going to break Peter Parker’s heart.”

“Poor kid. Perhaps I should change,” Matt laughed.

“Too late—the car’s almost here. You’ll just have to let him down easy,” she said, winking. “Or, y’know, don’t. Maybe you need a change of pace.”

“Whatever.”

The party was not as bad as Matt had dreaded. He and Karen had been seated at a table with an imam who ran a shelter for LGBT teens, a high school teacher who had started a daycare at the school so his pregnant students wouldn’t drop out after they had their babies, a grandmother who had successfully lobbied the city to clean up a toxic industrial canal running behind her housing project, and a 25-year-old law clerk who had exposed a massive judicial corruption scheme in Staten Island. They were all interesting and inspiring people, and before Matt knew it their dessert plates were being cleared and coffee was being offered and they were moving on to the speeches and handing out of awards.

Throughout it all, however, he was keenly aware that Parker, sitting two tables over, had been casting glances his way the entire night, and the back of Matt’s neck would flush whenever he did. Matt couldn’t help but tune into the conversation at Parker’s table. He had an easy, self-deprecating charisma, charming his tablemates with well-told stories of his worst assignments, his wildest assignments, and the time he nearly fell off the Manhattan Bridge trying to take a picture of Spider-Man. “Unfortunately, the camera didn’t make it,” he said.

Matt smiled involuntarily. _Nice touch, kid._

Finally, after the speeches and the awards, Parker worked his way over to Matt’s table, which had largely been abandoned in favor of the dance floor. He reintroduced himself and Matt invited him to sit.

“You got new glasses,” he said. “Wayfarers?”

“Between the trial and the magazine, I was feeling a little too recognizable. Thought I’d switch things up a little,” Matt said. “Though Karen says I’m one fedora away from looking like a Blues Brother.”

“I would have said Tom Cruise in _Risky Business_ ,” Parker said. “Where is your better half, anyway? I thought I saw her earlier.”

“Ex-better half,” Matt said. “I believe she’s off trying to score herself a New Year’s Eve date right now, if you’re looking to put your name in the hat.”

“Alas, as beautiful as she is, she’s not my type.”

“Too old or too female?”

The question landed like a horseapple between them and Parker was quiet for a beat, regarding him. “Not too old,” he said evenly.

Matt realized he had miscalculated badly—that listening in on Parker’s dinner conversation had given him a false sense of rapport. It was a mistake he had trained himself long ago to avoid, but Parker had him off-balance in a way he hadn’t felt before. “I’m sorry. That was none of my business,” he said, struggling to salvage the situation. “I forget sometimes that not every conversation is a cross-examination.”

“I’m a big boy, Matt. I wouldn’t have answered the question if I didn’t want to,” Parker said, though with more lightness than Matt suspected he felt. Then he cast a look back at the ballroom, and Karen, and swirled the last dregs of wine in his glass. After a moment’s thought, he asked, “You want to go down to the bar and get some real alcohol?”

Matt could hardly turn down the opportunity to learn more about the only other masked hero he’d ever met. As they stood, Parker waved toward Karen, who was heavily entwined with a tall, well-built man, then gestured toward the grand staircase. “I’m just letting Karen know where we’re going,” he said.

“Has she located any prey?” Matt asked innocently, unfolding his cane.

“The guy who founded the coding academy for homeless kids, I think?”

“Well, she always did have a soft spot for do-gooders,” Matt said.

Downstairs they chose seats at a two-top in the back corner and Parker bought a round—Macallan neat for Matt, bourbon old fashioned for him. He was just as funny and charming as he’d been with his tablemates earlier that night and the conversation flowed easily from fantasy baseball to music to the best place to find Mexican food in the city to their worst subway nightmares to their favorite bars and half their life stories besides.

With their second round of drinks, they toasted rather boisterously to being native New Yorkers—an increasingly endangered species—and then, as that inevitably led to questions about family, they toasted rather more soberly at the discovery that they’d both been orphaned before age 10.

“Mine died in a plane crash,” Parker said. “My aunt and uncle took me in, but then my uncle was killed in a robbery, so it’s just me and my aunt now.”

“My mom died when I was a baby and my dad was murdered,” Matt said. “Nobody wanted to adopt a pre-teen with special needs so I was raised by nuns.”

“You win,” Parker said, reaching across the table to clink his glass against Matt’s. “Cheers.”

Matt grinned. “I tell you what though—that story’s catnip to women.”

Parker laughed. “Aren’t you quite the cad?”

“I’m just a man who knows how to turn his weaknesses into strengths,” Matt said. “Use what you got, right?”

“It’s a good skill to have,” Parker said, and then, with a deadpan smile: “Unfortunately, I have no weaknesses, so I can’t relate.”

Matt laughed—harder than he should have, but he was thoroughly and pleasantly buzzed now, and flattery was a good way to get someone to stick around a little longer. After all, he might never have another chance for a peek under Spidey’s hood.

“So what made Peter Parker want to be a photographer?” he asked.

“I liked art, but I didn’t just want to be an artist, you know? I wanted to be useful, too. And photography seemed like the most useful of the arts.”

“How so?”

“There are so many photos that have changed the way we think about important things—Dorothea Lange’s photo of a migrant worker and her children during Depression, or Nick Ut’s photo of the young Vietnamese girl covered in napalm, or Annie Liebowitz’s nude portrait of Demi Moore pregnant.” The readiness with which Parker summoned his examples told Matt that he’d asked a familiar question, but one he cared deeply about. “They were all compelling images in their own right, but they also forced us to confront truths that maybe we would have preferred not to.”

“So you want to change the world.”

“I want to inspire the world to change itself,” Parker said. “Maybe not so much with the magazine work, but I try to do what I can with my art.”

“And how do you do that?” Matt asked, genuinely curious. As much as his enhanced senses had filled the gap of his blindness, art—or at least pictures—remained out of reach.

Parker laughed, startled by the question. “Right now I’m working on a series of portraits of exotic dancers and their kids at home in poses inspired by the paintings of an American impressionist named Mary Cassatt,” Parker said. “She was known for painting these sweet, unguarded moments of wealthy mothers with their children, and I want to show how some of the most objectified women in the city and their families are worthy of the same respect.”

“Mary-slash-Magdalen,” Matt said. “That’s the title for your show.”

Parker laughed. “I may steal that, actually.”

“No stealing required. It was freely given.”

“If I use it, I’ll put you on the guest list for my opening,” he said. “But don’t feel obligated to come.”

“Depends on how good the wine and cheese is.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Parker chuckled. “But if I could ask you something out of professional interest--do you have meaningful experiences of visual art? Like if someone were to describe a picture to you, would it inspire some aesthetic feeling? Would you create a mental picture of it or--?”

Matt had to be careful here. He never lied about his experience of blindness—only about the degree to which his other senses compensated. Fortunately, he could be entirely honest this time. “I always appreciate a description, but at the end of the day, I’m probably going to be more interested in the story behind the picture than the picture itself. It’s been a long time since I thought about the world in a visual way.”

“What…happened?” Parker asked, his voice more tentative now. “And please tell me to fuck off if that’s too personal.”

“I’m a big boy, Pete. I won’t answer anything I don’t want to,” Matt teased, stalling while he decided how much he wanted to say. He knew the more he opened up to Parker, the more likely Parker would open up to him, but that didn’t make The Story any less tiresome.

 _Just get it over with._ “A Roxxon truck hauling some corrosive chemical overturned in my neighborhood and spilled. I was crossing the street when it happened and got burned pretty badly on my hands and my face.” Matt held up his left hand so Parker could see the thick quarter-moon burn scar that curved along the heel of his hand and across his wrist. “It got into my eyes and that was it. Lights out.”

Parker whistled softly.

“So, that happened,” Matt said. “It’s a great conversation-killer, isn’t it?”

Parker laughed a little nervously, but seeing that Matt was not offended, decided to press on. “Do you remember what things looked like?”

 _You’re a curious one, aren’t you?_ “Yes, but not very clearly anymore.” Matt took another sip of scotch while he considered whether or not to keep going. _I know his secret,_ he thought. _I suppose I owe him one of mine._ “I still have one really sharp memory of what my dad looked like, though. He was a boxer, and after his fights I’d have to help clean him up because his arms were so tired and his hands were shaking so much he could barely lift them. But he loved to fight, man. He’d come home beat halfway to hell, and even when he lost—which was a lot—his eyes would have so much pride in them. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.” Matt drained his glass. “That’s what got him killed. He refused to throw a fight, and they killed him for it.”

“I think I can see why you became a lawyer,” Parker said, waving at the waitress for another round.

Matt tilted his head in agreement. “They were not unrelated events.”

Parker was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, he addressed the empty glass in his hand, not Matt. “After my folks died, my aunt and uncle hung our family photos in my new bedroom so I would feel more at home, but every night I’d be afraid to fall asleep because I was scared a fire would break out and I’d lose those, too. Finally, my uncle scanned them all and kept a backup disc at his office just in case. Then I got worried because I didn’t have any photos of Aunt May and Uncle Ben, either, so I made him scan all those, too.” Parker shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Then, when I was 12, my uncle was murdered. My aunt gave me his camera, and I began to take photos of her every day, sometimes more. I’d take photos of the cat, of our house, of our neighborhood—I even joined the middle school newspaper so I’d have permission to take pictures at school. I was so afraid that everything was going to fall apart and I’d have nothing to remember it by.”

“I hear you,” Matt said.

“So my aunt did two things—she put me into therapy and she bought be a bunch of books on photojournalism. And the rest is history.” Parker sat back and shook his head a little. “Jesus. I haven’t told anyone that story in years.”

His heartbeat confirmed it.

“I feel like we’ve been through the wars together tonight, brother,” Matt said.

“My glass is empty, but cheers to that,” Parker said.

Just as the waitress was delivering their next round, Karen came downstairs, high heels in hand, minus her new beau, pulled up a chair and ordered a vodka tonic. Not her first of the night, Matt could tell. Or her third.

“He’s HANDSY,” she sighed. “And I’m pretty sure he’s married. Ugh.”

“Well that’s it, he is officially NOT a New Yorker changing the city for the better anymore,” Parker declared, clearly as relieved as Matt for the opportunity to change the subject.

“Want me to break his arms?” Matt asked, only half-kidding.

“Oh, he’s not worth it,” Karen said. She tossed back her drink and waved for another. “But Matt. We _do_ have a problem. The aforementioned problem is that I seem to have left my apartment keys at your place. I don’t want to take you away from your extremely charming companion, but I really just need to go home and crash for about ten hours and in order to do that I need to get into your apartment to get my keys.” She accepted the new vodka tonic, took a sip, then pushed it away. “Also, can we cancel work tomorrow?”

Parker laughed—a full-throated whoop that made the few other customers in the bar turn their heads—and nodded toward Matt. “It would be cruel to deny her.”

“Okay, let’s get you home,” Matt said, standing up.

“Need help?” Parker asked, standing up as well. “With her, I mean.”

“I am not an invalid,” Karen declared, then to Matt in a stage whisper that was all too audible to anyone within half a dozen feet: “Matt, he’s CUTE.”

Matt winced and flushed bright red. “We’ll be fine,” he said to Parker. Then, in a moment of inspiration, he fished a business card out of his wallet and pushed it across the table. “In case anyone you know needs a lawyer,” he said.

* * *

 

It was freezing outside and a light snow had begun to fall, but between the booze and their coats and Matt’s fury at Karen’s behavior it didn’t seem all that cold, so they walked the 15 blocks back to Hell’s Kitchen.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Matt said finally, a block away from his apartment.

“You guys seemed to be really into each other,” Karen said. “I’m just trying to help.”

“By doing what? Embarrassing me? Creating false expectations for him? What were you thinking?”

“Matt, he was 1,000 percent hitting on you and you know it.”

“He knows what team I’m on,” Matt protested.

“Do you?”

A chill that had nothing to do with the weather poured over Matt’s skin, as though he had suddenly been skinned and left to freeze in the snow, and he stopped short. “What’s gotten into you, Karen?”

“Do you think I really don’t know what you look like when you flirt?”

“I wasn’t flirting.” _I was just leading him on to keep him talking._

“Then why’d you give him your number?”

“Because—I don’t know. It seemed polite?” Matt grabbed her arm and continued walking. “It’s hard to make friends in this city.”

“Matt—” but then Karen shook her head. “You’re right. I was an asshole, and I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Matt said. “I know you mean well, sweetie, but you’ve got it wrong. I’m not going to lie—since Foggy moved to D.C., I’ve missed having a guy around to talk to. But that’s all it is.”

“I miss him,” Karen agreed.

“Me too.”

But his argument with Karen continued long after he bundled her into a cab home and climbed into bed.

Tonight hadn’t been the first time he’d courted a man’s attention.

She did not know—could not know—about that night. It had been in college, long before he’d even met Karen. He and Elektra had been dating seriously for about three or four months when she first proposed bringing someone else into their bed. It hadn’t come as any surprise—he’d never met anyone as hungry for sensation as Elektra. But he’d never been able to bring himself to hit her as hard as she said she wanted, so when she said she wanted a threesome with another man, he thought, well, he could probably at least give her that.

They chose him together at a bar she knew was good for making such connections. He was a junior at NYU, tall and slim with fashionable glasses and ears heavy with thick steel rings. His name was Ryan, and after a few drinks, they were chatting easily. To his surprise, Matt didn’t mind when Ryan’s left hand found its way under the table to his knee and kept it there until it was time to go back to Elektra’s apartment.

So perhaps it should not have been a surprise, later, when Ryan kissed Matt over Elektra’s shoulder at one point, or that Matt had kissed him back. Twice. Or when their fingers dug deep grooves into each others’ backs, Matt’s cock up Elektra’s ass while Ryan sucked her clit, as she came between them with a scream he’d never heard before or since.

Later, as they lay exhausted in a tangle of bodies and arms and legs, Ryan had traced a questioning finger up Matt’s thigh, but Matt was too drunk and spent to consider it.

Ryan was gone by the time Matt woke the next morning, and he and Elektra split up not long after that. Nearly 20 years later, it felt more like a dream than anything else.

And yet tonight he remembered it as if it were yesterday.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm [BeaArthurPendragon](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com) on Tumblr too!


	4. Even Secrets Are Not What They Seem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter's up to something. Father Lantom has advice.

**June 2018**

Karen and Matt spent the morning triaging their active cases and working out how to handle any new ones, each decision a tiny island of control in the sea of chaos Matt found himself in. Still, each case they referred out intensified his dread another notch because he knew every case they referred out was likely a client lost for good.

“If all our outstanding invoices get paid, we’re good through the end of August,” Karen said.

“What if I don’t take a salary?”

“If we _both_ only draw a _half_ salary,” Karen said sternly as she typed the figures into the spreadsheet, “We can get through September. Maybe October.”

“We may not have a business anymore if we stay closed that long,” Matt said dourly.

“Yes, we will,” Karen said. “We’ve been through lean times before.”

* * *

**Early 2015**

By late January, Matt had given up on ever hearing from Parker again. He had not crossed paths with Spidey since that spring, though that didn’t surprise him since Daredevil spent most of his time in Manhattan and Spidey usually kept to Brooklyn and Queens, but he found himself patrolling Murray Hill and Kips Bay more than usual, as if he could catch his scent across the East River. He never did.

But on the first day of February, he turned his phone back on after leaving court to find a new voice mail from a number he didn’t recognize.

“Hey Matt, ah, this is Peter Parker? I’ve been traveling a lot for work this month but I just got back for the foreseeable future and was wondering if you wanted to grab a beer after work sometime this week? If not, that’s cool, no worries. Anyway, this is my cell, so call or text, I don’t know if you do texting, but whatever… OK, ah, hope everything’s going well with you. Bye.”

He listened to the message twice more, trying to detect any hint of an ulterior motive, but decided that Parker sounded so casually earnest that only a psychopath could fake it.

It was well nearly five and growing colder by the minute, but Parker’s call had given him a lot to think about so he decided to walk the four miles home despite the lung-punishing chill. Stick, dead for years now, probably would have approved. Then Matt smiled. _He probably would have docked points for wearing a coat, or gloves, or shoes._

He wanted to meet Parker again, but he knew the more they interacted in civilian life, the more likely Parker would be to discover who Matt was and what he knew about him.

If it just stopped with Parker, that would be okay, but Matt knew it wouldn’t: The Avengers did not fuck around when it came to protecting Spider Man’s true identity. He’d bet his life that SHIELD was already keeping occasional tabs on the doings of Daredevil and the rest of the Defenders, but he’d never once detected even a hint of direct surveillance. He knew that would change the minute they learned what he knew.

Still, he’d be an idiot to walk away from access to an Avenger. Given how obsessed the universe’s biggest assholes were with attacking New York City, Parker could be a valuable source of intel. Matt wasn’t stupid: Parker’s job was a cover that gave him an excuse to leave town for days or weeks at a time. And simply knowing where he was going, and when, could tell Matt a lot.

Matt risked his life every night for New York. If he had to risk being discovered by the Avengers, so be it.

So: forward, then. Carefully. Very, very carefully.

Matt waited until he had defrosted under a screaming hot shower and had a couple of fingers of scotch on board before calling Parker back.

To his surprise, Parker answered. Weren’t millennials supposed to be allergic to talking on the phone? Matt had only been prepared to leave a message.

“Hey, you,” Parker said, with a lazy delight in his voice that told Matt he was smiling as he spoke. It was going to be hard to keep his interest without leading him on, Matt realized. “How have you been?”

“Good. Busy,” Matt said. “I just wrapped up a trial today. Looking forward to a little downtime before the next one.”

“Did you win?”

“I did. Got a nice chunk of money for someone who needs it.”

“First round’s on me, then.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Matt wasn’t ready to introduce Parker to the grimy glory of Josie’s, so he suggested a new craft brewery that had opened in an old warehouse on West 49th.

He sensed Parker standing outside the brewery from two avenues away. He was pacing a little, scrolling through his phone, then pacing more. Matt exhaled in relief. Parker’s nerves meant that an awkward conversation was almost certainly in their future, but at least it meant he wasn’t thinking about Daredevil.

He spotted Matt crossing the street and bounded toward him to close the distance. “Hey, Matt,” he said breathlessly, and tapped Matt’s arm in greeting, the electric thrum of his touch as strong as it was before. “Good timing. I just got here too.”

Even Matt had to admit he was adorable. He took Parker’s arm—Parker’s heartbeat ticking up half a notch—and they went inside.

“First and foremost,” Parker said as they sat down at the bar, “I have to know if Karen made it home in one piece after that night.”

Matt laughed. “She did. And she even made it to work the next day.”

“She seems like a good egg.”

“She is,” Matt agreed.

“And she’s your ex. And your employee. I’m sorry if this is prying, but how does that even work?”

“Well, first thing, Karen’s a full partner in the business, not my employee, and it works because we’re adults and we’re still friends?” Matt shrugged. “We’ve worked together for more than ten years but we were involved for barely a year, so.”

“Well, good for you. That’s rare.”

The bartender interrupted to take their orders—stout for Matt, IPA for Parker—and when she returned with the drinks, Matt tried to steer the conversation away from his love life, past or no.

“So where did you go for work? Anywhere interesting?”

“Vienna, Prague, and Budapest,” he said. “It was for a spread on Central Europe in the off season.”

The first half had been true. The second half was not. Matt made a note to go back and see if there had been anything in the news to suggest what he’d really been up to. “Which did you like best?”

“Prague, definitely,” Parker said. (True.) “It was the only European capital that didn’t get the shit bombed out of it during World War II, so it’s this incredible architectural time capsule. I could walk around for years and find something new every day.”

“I’ve never been outside New York City,” Matt admitted. “Well, no. I went to the Ikea in New Jersey once.”

“So where would you go if you could?” Parker had turned sideways on the barstool, facing Matt, one elbow resting on the bar, legs crossed. He was really quite elegant, Matt realized.

“Spain, I think. Feel the cobblestones under my feet, listen to some flamenco and all the Castilian accents, drink a lot of wine, eat a lot of tapas, go swimming in the Mediterranean…” Matt shrugged. “Honestly, I just read a lot of Hemingway in college and that made me want to go.”

“I love Spain,” Parker said. (True.) “My first travel assignment was to Granada, in the south. I had to shoot the Alhambra, which is this amazing Moorish palace on a hill overlooking the city. Every inch of this place is covered in tile mosaics and these intricately carved geometric patterns—the work is so fine, it looks like lace. Some of the details are thinner than a fingernail. I’ve never seen anything like it.” (Also true. So maybe not every travel assignment was a cover.)

Parker sounded so awed by the memory that Matt could not help but smile. “Sounds amazing.”

Blessedly, they were interrupted by the bartender bringing their second round, and by the time she left they had moved on to less transcendent territory—Matt telling Parker of his early days practicing law, when more of his clients paid in barter than cash, and Parker regaling him with (true) anecdotes about travel mishaps and gossiping about the famous people he’d photographed.

As awkward as he felt, he was also enjoying himself immensely. Parker reminded him a little of Foggy, but just a little—he was sunny and voluble and charming and so devoid of irony that he seemed to hail from another decade. He was curious and interested and interesting, and Matt was dying to ask him how on earth Spider-Man had come into the picture. At one point Parker uncrossed and recrossed his legs as he shifted his weight on the bar stool and the outside of his foot came to rest gently against Matt’s shin, and Matt let it rest there unacknowledged, unable to figure out how to respond in a way that let Parker know he was neither offended nor interested.

Because the truth was, he wasn’t _un_ interested, either. Parker was enormously charismatic, and so beautifully precise in his movements that it was impossible not to pay attention to him.

After a too-long moment Parker moved his foot, and called it a night not long after, pleading a 5 a.m. photo call the next day. (False, but Matt suspected it had less to do with the ignored flirtation and more with the reason Matt had been about to plead an early-morning arraignment—they both had a night’s work ahead of them.)

Outside, a light, misty sleet had begun to fall. “Do you want me to hail you a cab or anything?” Parker asked.

“No thanks, I don’t have far to go,” Matt said, pointing west.

“I have to catch the 7 so—” Parker shrugged, glancing east.

“Well, hey, it was good to catch up again,” Matt said, releasing Parker’s arm and holding out his hand to shake.

“Definitely.” When Parker took Matt’s hand he looked intently at Matt’s face, apparently trying to make a decision. Out of nowhere, Matt found himself wondering if Parker would try to kiss him.

Whatever it was, nothing happened, but as Matt turned to go back to his apartment, he realized Parker had not moved, that he was watching Matt make his way down the street. He watched until Matt turned north on 11th Avenue and out of sight.

* * *

That night Matt suited up and worked his way over toward the Queensboro bridge. He knew Parker lived just across it, in Long Island City, and he wondered if he was home or out on patrol, like him. A part of him very much wanted to cross the bridge and see if he could find Parker’s building to find out, but in the end, reason prevailed, and he reluctantly returned across town.

But then, once he was back in the Kitchen, the wind shifted and he caught Parker’s scent. He was on a roof, not the street, and Matt concentrated until he located him halfway up West 47th, above the building with the deli he and Karen ordered lunch from more days than not.

Spider-Man was casing his office.

He didn’t think Parker’s senses were as finely tuned as his, but Matt gave him a wide berth anyway, circling around to the rooftop of the building behind the deli and climbing up to the top of the water tower.

Parker was crouched on roof wall, ready to leap at any time, but he wasn’t going anywhere—he was just watching the building. After a few minutes, a crash of breaking glass and a burglar alarm startled them both. Parker took one last glance at Matt’s office window, then headed toward the crime.

Matt followed at a distance, but Parker did not need his help. By the time Matt got there, Parker had immobilized the burglars in webbing and police sirens were drawing near.

It was then that Parker spotted him, up on the roof of the building across the street. Matt raised his hand in greeting, and thanks. Parker saluted with two fingers, then, as the police came around the corner, waved them over and took off into the night.

Matt couldn’t sleep that night. What had Parker been doing? Had he given himself away by letting Parker see him again? Not three hours earlier Parker had been standing barely two feet away, studying his face like a painting, the memory of the pressure of Parker’s shoe pressed against his shin still fresh.

Deciding whether or not to kiss him.

The memory of Ryan rose unbidden, prompting a sudden familiar flush of warmth through his belly.

No. That had been exciting because he _wasn’t_ , not because he _was_.

Right?

* * *

More than a week later, he could not shake the weirdness of that night. The more time passed, the more certain he was that he had enjoyed the gentle pressure of Peter’s foot against his shin—he was Peter to him now, Matt realized—and the more certain he would have enjoyed that kiss, if indeed one had been in the making.

He supposed it was his move, such as it was, but he had no idea what to say. Even though he could name his desire now, he didn’t know whether he wanted to pursue it—especially with Peter Parker, of all the men in the world. And even if he did know, there were still the secret identities to negotiate, and he had no idea how to begin to broach that. Any of it, really. He’d never been less certain of anything in his life, right now, except that he liked Parker and wanted to spend more time with him. And maybe see what it was like to kiss him? Maybe.  

As the days wore on, he realized he was not going to be able to solve this without some outside perspective, and since he couldn’t tell Karen Peter’s secret, he sought out the one person he could.

Saint Michael’s was a small but beautiful historic church wedged between a pair of five-story walkups on West 54th, notable only for the Tiffany stained-glass rose window that had been donated by a local gangster during Prohibition in exchange for keeping the church’s cellar blocked off for, ahem, structural repairs. For more than nine years.

The basement still smelled of rum, though Matt was the only one who could detect it now. Father Lantom, by contrast mostly smelled of shaving cream, Ben-Gay and denture cream now, and beneath it, something else. Age. Matt had known him since he first arrived at St. Agnes’ Children’s Home, which backed onto St. Michael’s and shared a yard. Father Lantom had seemed ancient to him at the time, but he could not have been more than 50, which made him 80 now. Twice Matt’s age, and yet Father Lantom had never treated him as anything other than an equal. Even when he was a boy, Father Lantom had never condescended. For all the awful priests out there, and he’d met one or two, Father Lantom was definitely one of the good guys.

There was no one waiting for confession, but there never was, anymore.

“Don’t you get tired sitting alone in this box for hours?” Matt asked.

“I’m not alone, Matthew. The Big Guy always keeps me company,” Father Lantom said in gentle reproof. “Though sometimes even He runs out of things to say.”

Matt chuckled.

“What’s on your mind, Matthew?”

“That’s the question isn’t it,” Matt said, his nerves tightening his voice more than he would have liked. "I met someone about a month ago. We’ve only seen each other a couple of times because of the holidays, but I think there’s a real connection there. I don’t know, maybe we’re just good friends, maybe something more. I don’t know yet.”

“That’s not a sin.”

“Well, it’s a man. Nothing’s happened yet, but.”

“Ah.”

“So there’s that.”

“You don’t need me to tell you what the Church thinks.”

“No.”

Father Lantom was quiet for a minute before speaking again. “Tell me something. Most of the people I have this conversation with say they’ve known this about themselves for most of their lives. But if I’m not mistaken, this is the first I’ve heard about this from you.”

“He’s made me realize that I might have some soul-searching to do.”

“Matthew, you search your soul more than anyone I know.”

“Maybe not enough,” Matt said. “But there’s something else. I know something very important about this person, and he doesn’t know that I know.”

“If I’m not mistaken, there’s something important about you that he doesn’t know, either.”

“That’s how I came to know his secret.”

“So, the only thing I would ask you to consider: This connection you feel with this person—how much of it has to do with knowing this secret of his? Could it be creating the illusion of a level of intimacy that isn’t there?”

“It’s definitely there.”

“In that case, you’re bringing an awful lot of asymmetry into this new relationship.”

“I know.”

“Unless it would cause harm to him, you have a duty to tell him _what_ you know. Whether you care for him or trust him enough to tell him _how_ you know—I can’t make that decision for you.”

“That’s the part I’m struggling with.”

“Is he a good person, Matthew? Is he respectful and generous and kind? Does he have concern for his fellow man? Is his heart a place of safety for those who love him?”

 _A place of safety._ Matt smiled. Then he remembered Parker sitting on the roof across the street from his office and the smile faded. “I think so. I want to believe so.”

“Well. You know more than most how short life is, and how important it is to surround yourself with good people when you do the kind of work you do. So, find out if he’s good. And if he is, tell him.”

Outside, the February afternoon had turned damp and raw as the sun prepared to set. Matt was exhausted but restless from the coffee and his dilemma, and instead of going home he walked aimlessly through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, quietly thumbing through his rosary in his coat pocket, trying to will an answer to become clear.

What was clear, when he finally got home and thawed his half-frozen feet and fingers under a hot shower, was that he couldn’t tell Parker what he knew if he didn’t talk to him.

Still, he put it off. He heated up some leftover Thai takeout and downed a beer in two swallows and lay on the sofa listening to the sleet rattle against his windows and only after he realized it was close to ten and probably getting too late to contact anyone for anything decent, he grabbed his phone and dictated a text message.

Then he deleted it.

“Fuck,” he said to the ceiling.

He chickened out.

And the next day.

And the next day.

And then it was Friday, and it had been almost two weeks since that strange Tuesday night, and he was decidedly not ready to meet Peter without the excuse of work the next morning, so the standoff dragged into Monday, when finally, during a break between clients around 3 o’clock, he checked his phone and found a text from Peter asking if he wanted to meet up tomorrow night.

He accepted.

* * *

As February gave way to March, they began meeting semi-regularly at the brewery on West 49th for happy hours that never ended in anything other than a handshake, but which kept happening more weeks than not. Always on relatively noncommittal Tuesdays, just shooting the shit, new friends being new friends, Matt told himself, although Peter’s subtle, plausibly deniable flirting was getting harder and harder to deny. Twice more, Matt caught the scent of another man on him, perhaps the friend Wade he sometimes mentioned? Well, Peter was young. And Matt wasn’t jealous. Curious, if he was being honest with himself—but not jealous.  

Meanwhile, Spider-Man continued to make occasional appearances in Hell’s Kitchen, but never for long, and never to do much more than snare the occasional purse snatcher or drug dealer. He’d always take a lap past Matt’s office, but never stopped for long—just paused long enough on the roof across the street for a few moments before moving on. It seemed for all the world that he was just reassuring himself that the office was still there.  

Or, less sentimentally, the Avengers were stepping up their surveillance of the Defenders. Which meant they already knew who he was. That Peter already knew who he was.

Several times Matt followed him all the back to Queens, but his surveillance yielded nothing except Peter’s home address, a large, top-floor prewar apartment in a run-down building on an ungentrified block at the edge of Long Island City.

 _What on Earth did he want?_ Matt wondered. Either Peter had a crush on him and was stalking him as Spidey, or Spidey was on a mission that had something to do with Matt and was using Peter to keep tabs on him.

He liked Peter—a lot—but neither of these scenarios made Matt sleep better at night. 

He needed more information. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading along so far! I don't know how many chapters I'll get up this weekend, so subscribe if you want to be notified when new ones post.
> 
> Come find me on Tumblr as [BeaArthurPendragon](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com) too!


	5. I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt and Karen miss Jessica. Matt and Peter both put their cards on the table.

**June 2018**

“What do you want to do about the Ortega divorce?” Karen asked. By the afternoon, case files had overtaken the entire kitchen table.

“I think Jess still has the photographs for that one,” Matt said. Then reality seemed to thump itself hard against his chest. “Had. Fuck.”

Karen reached across the table and took his hand in hers. Over the years he’d bonded with all of the Defenders—they’d kept a monthly poker game going for nearly a decade—but losing Jessica hurt on a hundred different levels. He’d hired her so often to investigate various cases that he’d kept her on retainer for years, and, improbably, she and Matt become good friends.

They were, on the surface, intolerable to each other. She was prickly and rude and unmanageably drunk, and to her he was unbearably prim, effete, and overeducated. But they shared the orphans’ bond and the burden of unasked-for superpowers—and most importantly, they recognized each other’s rage—and that went a long way toward solidifying a friendship. They had lunch a few times a month (on him), and he always bought her the best bottle of scotch he could afford for Christmas (because her gift to him was to share it). They’d slept together a few times over the years, for no particular reason other than to push loneliness or darkness away for a few hours, but his favorite times with her had been when they ended up on a rooftop somewhere late after a mission, watching the sun rise (her) and listening to the city awaken (him). 

“Did Claire say when they’re going to release the bodies?” Matt asked.

“No,” Karen said. “I don’t know if they ever will, to be honest. Maria Hill told Claire their DNA is worth billions on the black market.”

“They never should have been there,” Matt said. “I never should have called them in.”

“They all wanted this guy off the board. Jessica never would have forgiven you for going in alone and getting yourself killed.”

“Yeah, but she’d be alive.”

“I know,” Karen said. “I miss her too.”

* * *

**Spring 2015**

One Wednesday in early March Matt met Jessica at an East Village bar so grubby not even hipsters drank there.

“What’s with the urgent social call, Murdock?” Jessica asked wearily. “I can’t stay long—I have a stakeout to get to.”

“I’m just curious--have you been seeing more of the Avengers around the city lately?”

“I saw Strange at the Union Square Farmer’s Market last year. He was getting some of that kombucha shit,” Jessica said, throwing back her drink and waving for another. “And you didn’t schlep all the way over to Alphabet City for a warm beer because you’re ‘just curious,’ so out with it.”

“Spider-Man’s been spending more time in Manhattan than he used to,” Matt said. “Specifically, the Kitchen. He’s not doing anything out of the ordinary—he’s just been doing it in my backyard a lot more often.”

“Well, golly gee, Matt, if I had to guess, I’d say he might be following you.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that one out,” Matt said. “I just need to know if they’re trying to get close to anyone else.”

“Not me,” Jessica said. “Trish hasn’t mentioned anything, either. Have you talked to Luke or Danny about it?”

“No. And don’t you talk to them about it, either. The fewer who know about this the better.”

“What have you gotten yourself into?” Jessica asked. “If it’s more zombie ninjas, so help me God—”

“I can’t tell you,” Matt said. “But it’s not zombie ninjas.”

“It’s your funeral,” Jessica said, throwing some cash on the bar and standing up. “Better not let it be anyone else’s, either.”

“I’ll put up the bat signal at the first sign of trouble,” Matt promised.

“Fucking martyr,” Jessica groaned as she left.

Matt spent the next two weeks following Luke and Danny to be sure, but there was no sign of Spidey or any other Avenger anywhere near them. Which, if he was honest with himself, he knew would be the case.

It was time to take the good father’s advice.

* * *

Matt arrived at the bar about 15 minutes early and asked the hostess to seat him at a quiet table toward the back, as far away from the baseball-watching scrum crowded three-deep at the bar as he could get. He sat with his back to the wall and mapped out the room’s exits—there was a service door past the kitchen down a short hall behind him, and another door to the outdoor seating a little ahead and to the left. He rested his left hand on his folded cane in case he needed to leave quickly.

He worked to calm his breath and his heart as he noted Peter entering the bar. Matt could always tell when Peter spotted him from a distance—his heartbeat quickened and he said “ah,” with a sense of relief, as if he was perpetually concerned Matt would not show up. Matt carefully governed his face to make sure he did not smile or react in any way to Peter’s approach until he said hello.

“Am I late?” Peter asked, sliding into the seat opposite.

“No, I got done with work a little early. I haven’t been here long.”

“Cool,” Peter said, turning toward the bar. “Hey, they have that coffee stout again—you want that? I think that’s the only thing different from last time, but I can go back through the list if you want.”

“Coffee stout’s fine,” Matt said, unexpectedly moved by the easy familiarity of the exchange. But he immediately warded that off by summoning up the memory of his alarm at catching Spider-Man staking out his office that first night two months before. Tonight was going to change things forever between them, and he needed to be prepared for the possibility that it could very well be for the worse.

He waited until the waitress brought their drinks and had moved quite a ways away. “I heard there’s a new after-hours place on West 47th,” Matt said. “Rooftop joint. Very exclusive.”

“Oh yeah?” Matt didn’t need to listen to Peter’s heartbeat to know he was stalling. “I didn’t know you were into the after-hours scene.”

“Maybe you could introduce me.”

Peter laughed, but Matt could hear the nerves on the edge of his voice. “I’m not following.”

“You were staking out my office from the roof of the building across the street last Thursday night around 12:30 a.m. Ten days before that, you passed by around 11:45. Five days before that--”

“Okay, stop,” Peter hissed. “How do you know?”

“Oh, no,” Matt said evenly. “First you tell me why, then maybe—maybe—I tell you how.”

“I don’t want to talk in here,” Peter said. “There’s too many people.”

“Speak quietly,” Matt said sternly. “Because I’m not going anywhere with you without some answers.”

Peter took a not-so-casual glance around the immediate vicinity before leaning forward and asking in a low voice, “Does the name Roses McGee ring any bells?”

It did. “Kitchen Irish. Only guy to survive Frank Castle’s purge. Went back to the motherland, last I heard.”

“He turned up in Woodside, Queens, a little after New Year’s, and he’s come bearing grudges.” Peter’s heartbeat remained steady as a drum—he was telling the truth. “A lot of bodies have been piling up that have his name all over them.”

“Shit,” Matt said, and he meant it. Roses McGee had trained as a sniper with the IRA in the ‘80s and his calling card was a single bullet to the heart, leaving a rose-sized bloodstain on his target’s lapel.

“You defended Castle, which makes you a target,” Peter said. “That rooftop is a perfect nest for a sniper. I wanted to make sure nobody had been casing it.” (True.)

“And? Any sign of him?” Matt rapidly began to spin through all the collars he’d made over the past three months, but none of them carried a whiff of the Irish mob. Frank had decimated their leadership three years before, and while of the street-level soldiers were still around, they’d been largely absorbed by the Italians across the river, or the Dogs of Hell biker gang.

“Not by you,” Peter admitted. (Also true.) “He seems primarily concerned with calling old debts in Queens right now.”

“Should I be worried? Should Karen?”

“You tell me,” Peter said wryly. “There’s really only one person in Hell’s Kitchen who could have spotted me, and I’m guessing he’s already on your side, right? Does he know we’re having this conversation?”

Matt nodded.

Parker crossed his arms and tilted back in his chair. “So how did he figure out who I was?”

Matt shrugged. “He’s a superhero. It’s his job.”

“You have a way to get in touch with him?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him to meet me above a bar called The Black Banshee at 57th and Roosevelt at midnight tonight. Maybe we can get this guy off the street once and for all,” Peter said briskly, rocking back forward and standing in one smooth motion. He counted out a pair of bills from his wallet and tapped them against Matt’s hand. “Here’s 20 bucks to cover the tab.”

“Wait,” Matt said, standing with him. “I’m an attorney. I keep as many secrets as a priest. I’m never going to share this conversation with anyone, and I want your promise you won’t, either. I don’t need SHIELD getting up in my business.”

Peter’s shoulders relaxed a fraction of a centimeter. “We’ll see how tonight goes,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk you out.”

* * *

Matt approached the Black Banshee very carefully. Peter had arrived early; he was already stationed on the roof at 20 minutes to midnight. But Matt had no intention of joining him there. Instead, he crept his way across the rooftops to the building across the alley and waited until the last moment to stand. Peter would recognize his voice in a heartbeat—he had to stay far enough away to avoid a conversation.

Peter spotted him right away, and raised his hand in greeting. Matt pointed at a new black SUV that had just turned down the alley between them. Peter nodded, and with swift gestures suggested a pincer attack—Peter taking the front of the truck and Matt the back. Matt nodded and counted down on his fingers from five.

Four-three-two-one-JUMP

It was over in minutes, Peter webbing the truck to the pavement and Matt making quick work of the frankly subpar henchmen Roses had made the misfortune of hiring. By 12:07, they were all webbed spread-eagled against the wall and police sirens were approaching.

Only then was Peter able to get close enough for long enough to truly look at Matt. His expression was unreadable behind the spider mask, but the tilt of his head told Matt he’d been made.

As soon as the first black-and-white turned down the alley, Peter and Matt scrambled for the roof and took off westward toward the river.

Eventually they reached a warehouse district that was, as far as Matt could tell, entirely deserted. Only then did Matt stop, hands on hips and breathing heavily, and allow Peter to catch up. In truth, Matt knew Peter could have caught him twice over, or simply webbed him. Allowing him to give chase was his way of letting Matt choose his ground for what came next.

They stood facing each other for a few moments without speaking, allowing their lungs to recover from their flight. Eventually Peter shook his head.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he said, his voice still hoarse from exertion. Matt nodded and on a count of three they both removed their masks.

“Jesus Christ,” Peter said, taking three swift steps to get a closer look at Matt’s face. He took Matt’s chin in his hand and turned his face toward a nearby security light buzzing to his right so Peter could get a clear view of his scars and his too-still eyes. “How--?”

“The chemical that blinded me sent my other four senses into overdrive,” Matt said. “You?”

“Radioactive spider bite during a field trip when I was 15. Gave me super-reflexes and dialed my senses up to 11,” Peter said, sitting on the roof’s retaining wall. Matt sat next to him. “But I can’t do what you do. How do you know where everything is so precisely?”

“It’s a combination of things—sound, of course, but also air currents, temperature differentials, smell. But mostly I just echolocate using ambient sound. I can hear that security light buzzing up there,” Matt said, pointing, “but I can also hear that buzz bouncing off of you, the wall we’re sitting on, the security stairwell ten feet away at our eight o’clock and the water tank about twenty feet away at about one-thirty.” Matt shrugged. “Did I miss anything?”

“Jesus.”

“It works with any sound—traffic noise, footsteps, air conditioners, bird calls, the little scrabbling sound rats make, even my own breath or heartbeat if I have to.”

“Is that how you managed to follow me for so long without my knowing?”

“Yeah,” Matt said, rubbing a knot in his shoulder. “I always kept at least a building between us.”

“Shit.” Parker looked at him with curiosity. “If you can do all that, why pretend you’re blind?”

“Well, first of all, I _am_ blind,” Matt said. “I can’t hide it. My powers help me navigate the three-dimensional world, but not the two-dimensional one. I can’t distinguish between colors, or watch TV, or make eye contact. I know there’s a billboard over there,” he said, pointing, “but I don’t know what it says.”

“But don’t you feel bad accepting help you don’t need?”

“Well, that’s the second thing. I do need it,” he said. “I only have so much gas in the tank. I can either use my powers to ditch the cane and live an ordinary life 24/7 as someone...a little less blind than I really am, or I can dial them down during the day so I have enough to fight crime at night. I choose the latter. Is it the right choice? I don’t know--I wrestle with that. I just know that there are some very, very bad guys out there and I can’t stand by and let them hurt people.”

“Do you ever think about going public?”

“Never,” Matt said immediately. “For one thing, I'd be disbarred. For another, I can’t put the people I care about at risk.”

“Me neither,” Peter said. “Once you’ve lost someone you love to the bad guys…”

“You’ll do anything to keep it from happening again.”

“Yeah.”

They sat in companionable silence for a while longer, until Matt stood and picked up his mask. “I have to go. I have court in the morning,” he said, replacing his mask. Then he held out his hand to shake. “Thanks for looking out for me. Even if I didn’t need it.”

Peter stood and took his hand. “Yeah, definitely.” Then, just as Matt turned to leave: “Can I pick the bar next time?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions? Hit me up on [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com)!


	6. I Don't Ask For Anything I Don't Want

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt surprises Peter...and himself. Things get a little steamy.

**June 2018**

That night insomnia set in, as if all those unconscious hours now needed to be spent in order to rebalance his accounts. He searched the guest room for some kind of distraction and discovered a clock radio on the nightstand. After a few minutes of fiddling with the device he had located a late broadcast of a Mets game in Los Angeles, and it was only the bottom of the first inning, so he had a good three hours, at least, of company.

He paced as he listened, trying to discharge the formless terror that had begun to take root in his chest all day. He didn’t care about the score, all that mattered was the rhythm of the game, the swing-and-a-miss and the short-to-second-to-first-and-he’s-out, because it reminded him of that first Mets game with Pete three years ago, and all the ones that came after.

* * *

**Spring 2015**

The Tuesday night happy hours continued after they bagged Roses McGee, their shared secret becoming a kind of delicious conspiracy of two. Not since Elektra had he felt so wholly attuned to another person. Empathetic though they were, neither Foggy or Karen had never fully been able to understand what it meant to be Daredevil—only Elektra had.

Or that’s what he thought before Peter. Elektra was a killer and would always be one; whether she was unable to change or simply didn’t want to, Matt never knew. She never killed the innocent, but she was unconcerned about her body count. To her, the world was divided into threats and non-threats, and any threat—no matter how minor, manipulated, or coerced they may have been—was fair game to her. Frank, at least, only killed the worst of the worst, and he never took pleasure in it, but Elektra was broken in some essential way that Matt could never figure out to heal.

In the end, he didn’t have to because she left him. He’d refused to abandon his studies to follow her around the world to fight the Hand, and she’d refused to stay in New York and use her skills to fight crime alongside him. Their final argument had ended with shattered glassware, overturned furniture and one of the most ferocious nights of sex of his life, and when he awoke in her bed the next morning, she was gone.

And then, of course, there was his growing attraction to Peter. His crush—now that he finally recognized it as such—had deepened into a proper fantasy. It was no longer Elektra’s ass he imagined when he closed his hand around his dick late at night.

What made this so confusing was that he had genuinely loved the women he’d shared his life with, admired their talents and enjoyed their company and treasured their care for him, and that had made pleasing them fun.

On the flip side, he was belatedly beginning to realize that he had been making a profound category error in defining his attraction to certain men his entire life. He had always assumed that he admired these men—all strong, intelligent, honorable men, who moved through the world with the confident grace that Matt had worked hard to acquire since becoming blind—because he wanted to be _like_ them, not _with_ them. It took meeting Peter Parker to make him realize how wrong he’d been.

But his decision to pursue this didn’t come until toward the end of March, when a flight attendant Matt had hooked up with here and there over the past couple of years texted to let him know she was in town for a few days and did he want to meet up?

_I can’t, sorry. I’m seeing someone._

And he realized, _oh my God you clueless idiot_ , it was true.

Three days later, Peter’s new photography exhibit had its opening at a small gallery in Chelsea. He’d ended up using Matt’s suggestion for the name, _Mary/Magdalen_ , and he texted Matt that morning that he was making good on his promise to put him on the guest list if he wanted to come.

_How about I buy you a drink afterward instead?_

_Deal._

They agreed to meet at 11:30 at a rather posh bar on West 20th, but at the last minute, Matt decided to surprise him at the gallery. This, Matt decided, was as good a night as any to move things along.

The reception was still going strong at 10:30 when Matt approached the gallery. He managed to slip inside relatively unnoticed, although it was not long before the guests began to cast curious glances at him.

“You came!” Peter said delightedly, enveloping Matt in a surprise hug that Matt found himself returning without reservation. “Oh, thank you. That means a lot.”

“Just seemed rude not to make an appearance,” Matt said. “Although I’m not sure if having a blind fan counts as a plus or a minus.”

“You’re a friend, not a fan,” Peter said, tucking Matt’s hand into the curve of his elbow. “Will you humor me and let me tell you about the pictures?”

“Of course,” Matt said.

To his surprise, he enjoyed it. Peter didn’t just describe the photos, he told Matt the stories of the women they depicted and how each painting he chose to replicate related somehow to the woman whose portrait he had taken. He was still a journalist at heart, Matt realized, albeit one with a very good eye. The next hour sped by, even though Peter occasionally had to pause to chat with a VIP. Matt quickly realized that he made an excellent wingman for Peter here. All he had to do was ask their interlocutor what they liked best about a particular photograph, and the extra bit of work it took them to describe that quality or idea seemed to be enough to seal the sale.

“You’re very good for business,” Peter said as they were leaving the gallery. “You have to come to all my shows now.”

Matt laughed. “I’m a lawyer. It’s my job to close deals.”

Instead of going to the bar where they’d planned to meet, Peter suggested a new Spanish place that had just opened on 11th Ave. They ordered a bottle of rioja and made their way to the back deck, which overlooked the West Side Highway and the Hudson River.

“People never think of New Jersey as pretty, but Weehawken lit up at night is really quite lovely,” Pete said.

“That’s where Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton,” Matt said, knowing it would annoy Peter.

“Smartypants.”

Matt grinned. “You enjoy the view, and I’ll enjoy the history.”

Pete refilled their glasses. “I hear they do a good paella here. Are you hungry? The kitchen’s open till one.”

Matt was certain that they both knew ordering dinner meant they’d be there for well over an hour longer. “Sure,” he said.

An hour had never passed more quickly. Suddenly they were swiping bread around a nearly empty pan, enjoying the last garlicky bits of the meal.

It was a beautiful night and Peter was still riding the adrenaline from his show, so they decided to walk the 35 blocks back to Hell’s Kitchen. As they walked, Pete glanced at him in a way Matt didn’t quite understand, but which became clear when he covered Matt’s hand with his own. Matt gave a shy laugh but didn’t ask him to stop.

When they reached Matt’s stoop, Pete swiveled in front of him, his hand still in Matt’s, and after a quick glance around, nipped him lightly on his lower lip. Matt stepped back, flushed, and touched his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said quickly, holding his hands out to his side. “I ah—wow. Shit. I’m sorry. I misread this.”

“No, you didn’t misread. I just, ah—” Matt shrugged. “Oh, hell.”

Peter stepped back and scanned him with the same look he had when he was trying to frame a photo during their shoot four months before. “You’ve never been with a man before.”

“No,” Matt said softly. Ryan, he decided, didn’t count. Not really.

“Do you want to be?”

Matt bit his lip and shrugged. “I think so?”

“Tonight?”

Matt paused, then nodded. “But I don’t know--”

“How far you want to go?”

Matt nodded. _Or what I’m doing. Or anything else._

“That’s entirely up to you.”

“Do you want to come up?” Matt asked. “See where it goes?”

“Okay,” Peter said.

They were too anxious to wait for the elevator, and instead took the stairs by twos up to Matt’s place. Once inside, Matt found himself standing in the middle of his living room, unsure of what to do next.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked. “I have some beer.”

“No, but don’t let me stop you,” Peter said.

Matt didn’t move, so Peter reached for Matt’s wrist and drew him close. “Is this okay?”

Matt’s breath began to catch in his throat. “Yes.”

Peter leaned forward, his forehead and nose touching Matt’s. “May I kiss you again?”

“Yes.”

Peter lifted Matt’s chin and kissed him deeply, his tongue lightly exploring Matt’s own, and Matt felt his knees soften and the center of his self fall far into the Earth. This was Ryan times a thousand. He rested his hands on Peter’s shoulders, his fingers clutching the sleeves of his t-shirt, stretching it tightly across Peter’s back.

“This okay?” Peter whispered, his lips still touching Matt’s.

“Yes,” Matt said, and slid one hand behind Pete’s head and the other into the small of his spine and kissed him back.

Their hands explored one another’s bodies as they kissed, their fingertips tracing the edges of muscles and their attachments to bone, eventually working their way up each other’s shirts and smiling as their skin contracted into gooseflesh beneath the other’s touch. The flatness of Peter’s chest, the slenderness of his hips—they were both utterly new and utterly right at the same time. Peter found the first scar, the chunk Nobu had taken out of his side in the warehouse by the river, but Matt found one almost as deep on Peter’s back and Peter stopped to shuck his shirt and Matt did the same and it was not long before their shoes and socks and jeans followed.

Peter ran his finger along the elastic edge of Matt’s boxers and Matt stumbled forward, nearly faint from pleasure. Peter caught him and placed a firm hand on the small of Matt’s back as he slowly slid his hand into the front of Matt’s underwear.

“Is this okay?” he breathed and Matt nodded.

“Don’t stop.”

Peter gathered Matt’s cock in his hand, and gently wrapped his fingers around it, working it to attention. Matt’s breath became shallow and ragged and he smiled and clutched Peter’s arms so hard that Peter would have bruises the next morning.

“Is that good?”

“Yes,” Matt said, but then almost immediately he closed his hand around Peter’s wrist to make him stop. “I can’t stand up any longer,” he said, and he and Peter stumbled into the bedroom, working their way out of their underwear as they walked.

Matt had recovered somewhat by the time they reached the bed, and Peter brushed the hair from his forehead and kissed him lightly. “Keep going?”

Matt took two breaths before answering. _Just admit it_. “Yes, but I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’ll know how to do this,” Peter said, and kissed his neck, and then his chest. He guided Matt down onto the bed and straddled him, the tip of his cock lightly brushing Matt’s belly as he nipped Matt’s earlobe, then kissed his way down Matt’s neck, then down his chest. It was late by now, Peter’s chin had become rough with stubble and Matt’s skin shivered against fine grit. Then Peter pressed his nose lightly against Matt’s solar plexus and Matt gasped as his stomach did a somersault.

“There are so many nerve endings right there,” Peter said, kissing the spot, then resuming his journey down to Matt’s navel. Then he stopped and looked up at Matt. “You know what’s coming next.”

“Me, I hope,” Matt said hoarsely, closing his hands around Peter’s wrists.

Peter laughed and touched Matt’s navel with a flick of his tongue before working his way down to the soft part of his belly, the tip of Matt’s cock pressing urgently into the hollow of Peter’s chin. Peter kissed it, but instead of taking it in his mouth he kissed his way down the shaft to the root and took a moment to tongue the tender spot where it met Matt’s balls, and Matt moaned.

He realized Matt could not hold out much longer so he worked his way back up Matt’s cock and then took it in his mouth.

“Oh God,” Matt whispered, and aimlessly ran his fingers through Peter’s hair and played with his ear before suddenly clutching the bedclothes and losing his voice entirely. Peter looked up but Matt was no longer paying attention to him, not really, and then a moment later he came into Peter’s mouth and Peter swallowed and after a moment, he rolled off and lay beside Matt on the bed.

“I’m sorry, I should have warned you,” Matt said.

“You were distracted and I didn’t mind,” Peter said, twining his fingers with Matt’s and kissing the back of his hand. “How are you doing?”

“Amazing,” Matt said, grinning. “I can’t believe that just happened. Oh my God.”

“I wish you could see your face right now,” Peter said, kissing his cheek. “You look like you just landed on the moon.”

After a few minutes Matt rolled on his side and began to lightly circle one of Peter’s nipples with his fingertip. “What can I do for you?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure what he might have just volunteered to do. He had fucked a few asses in his life, but the other way around—he wasn’t sure if he could do that.

But instead Peter, perhaps sensing his nervousness, said, “Baby steps. Let’s find out what you can do with those beautiful hands of yours.”

Matt let his fingers wind their way down Peter’s chest and belly, idly playing with the fine hairs that marked the way. Peter stood half-erect, stiffening and relaxing as he breathed and when Matt’s hand passed his navel Peter took it and guided it to his cock.

He closed Matt’s hand around it and Matt exhaled nervously. He had never held an erection that wasn’t his own, and he found it briefly disorienting. “Sorry.”

“This isn’t anything you haven’t done to yourself,” Peter said gently, not removing his hand from Matt’s, as his breath began to quicken. “Unless you’re too Catholic for that.”

“No one is too Catholic for that,” Matt said. Peter squeezed Matt’s fingers a little tighter and groaned with pleasure. They worked together slowly to wake him up, and Matt marveled at the way Peter’s eyes drifted shut and his mouth began to slacken. Matt kissed him and Peter carefully rolled onto his side to face him and they kissed then briefly paused for lube and then they began to kiss again, until Peter no longer remembered how to kiss, and his hand fell away from Matt’s and Matt continued on without him, as Peter’s breath began to catch and fall, catch and fall as his heart beat wildly against his ribcage, and then suddenly with a moan and a shudder he came right between them, marking both their bellies as much as the quilt below.

“Thank you,” Peter whispered. Matt kissed Peter’s forehead and nose and then Peter rolled spread-eagled on his back and sighed. “You have good hands.”

Matt rolled onto his back, too. He swept a finger through the streak of Peter’s cum on his belly and tasted it cautiously.

“You like it?”

“I don’t know yet,” Matt said.

“Well, I look forward to giving you the opportunity to find out sometime,” Peter said, kissing him and sliding out of bed. “But for now I’m going to take that beer,” he said. “Can I bring you one?”

“Please,” Matt said gratefully. He turned his head toward the door and concentrated on Peter’s lazy, loping stride through his apartment, the graceful way he bent down to open the fridge and the nonchalant way he flicked off the caps with his strong thumbs as easily as he would flip a coin. Whatever he looked like to anyone else, to Matt he was beautiful.

Peter gave Matt one of the beers and sat next to him. “Cheers,” he said, and they clinked the bottles and drained half their bottles in a single swig. Peter leaned into him, bumping his shoulder against Matt’s. “So that wasn’t too intimidating, was it?”

Matt waved the compliment away but he flushed a little. “I had forgotten what it felt like to be that new at this kind of thing.”

“It was fun, though, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then that’s all that matters.” He closed his hand around Matt’s and they drank in silence, and when they were done they were drowsy and lay down together and then they slept. 

* * *

In the morning, Matt awoke to the smell of bacon and coffee and found Peter at the stove. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said. “Unless I’m keeping you from your day.”

“No, stay,” Matt said, moving to the coffeemaker and pouring himself a cup. He touched Pete’s shoulder as he passed behind him and Peter reached up and squeezed his hand before resuming his work at the stove.

“I had a good time last night,” Peter said as he cooked.

“Me too,” Matt said, and was surprised to discover he was telling the truth. Awkward and fumbling though it had been, and no more adventurous than Tuesday night maintenance sex, it had nevertheless felt as natural to him as any night with Karen or Elektra had ever been, never mind the infinite dozens of one-night stands that had peppered his nights in between.

 “Can I ask you a strange question?” Matt asked as Peter lay the plates on the table.

“Of course.”

“When did you know that you—wanted men?”

“Always,” Peter said immediately. “I don’t think I really understood what it meant, though, until I was eleven or twelve. Definitely by thirteen, because all the kids in my Hebrew School were having their bar mitzvahs and at the parties I only ever wanted to dance with the boys.”

“Did you ever try to date women?”

“No,” Peter said. “But I’m a millennial, old man. It never occurred to me I needed to be something I wasn’t."

“I don’t know what I am anymore,” Matt said. “This took me by surprise.”

“Mmm. Did it, though?” Peter asked, in a tone of voice that suggested he certainly thought not. “Because surprising me last night was pretty fucking romantic.”

“Well, I knew by then what I wanted,” Matt said. “I was just very, very slow to figure it out.”

“I’ll say,” Peter said.

“I’m not naïve. I know what bisexuality is,” Matt said. “But, like, everything is so mixed up for me anyway. I’m not interested in what people look like--tall, short, thin, heavy, black, brown, white—”

“Male, female,” Peter offered.

Matt tilted his head in agreement. “It’s not that I’m unaware of the differences—of course not—but they’ve never mattered to me. I always assumed that it was just part of being blind. For me what’s attractive is their scent, their voice, how they move, their personality. And that’s been true since I had my first crush on Lydia Chin in fifth grade.”

“Did you ever have a crush on a boy?”

Matt shrugged. “I never allowed myself to. There were boys I liked intensely, boys I was jealous of, boys I wanted to be, or be with—I never could tell the difference. But I was a blind kid with no family, who nobody wanted to adopt, trying to keep a secret that for all I knew could have gotten me locked up in a laboratory for the rest of my life. I knew that I couldn’t afford to make my life any more complicated than it already was. I liked girls just fine, and the whole world just reinforces it, so I just pushed that other side of me away.” Matt shrugged. “Until I met you.”  

“Why me?”

“Are you fishing for a compliment?” Matt teased, and Peter kicked him lightly under the table.

“Because I’m curious,” Peter said. “Is it the superpowers thing?”

“Because we share a secret, yes. But also because you’re a good person, and I knew if this went sideways, you’d still…be kind about it.”

“Because I’m a nice gay superhero?” Peter asked seriously. “That’s it?”

Matt laughed. “And you make me laugh, and you smell amazing, and I cannot get over the way you move.”

“That’s better,” Peter said, preening a little over his coffee.

“What I want to know is what made you want to stick around so long when I clearly did not have a clue what I was doing. Neither one of us needed to meet up for happy hour every other week just to keep tabs on each other.” Matt grinned. “And yes, I’m fishing for a compliment.”

“Because I have a giant crush on you, dummy,” Peter said. “You’re handsome and smart and funny and passionate about your work and the people you want to help. And you may not have known what you were at the time, but I did—the moment I touched your face during your photo shoot and you smiled. I just knew.”

“I was sure you’d recognized me,” Matt said.

“Well, yeah—just not the way you thought. And I thought the reason it was taking me so long to get through to you was because you were blind and I hadn’t figured out how to flirt with you without all the knowing looks and little smiles,” Peter said. “I didn’t realize that it was because you were the world’s latest bloomer.”

“Thanks,” Matt winced.

“Relax. I like you. A lot,” Peter said, resting his hand on Matt’s arm. “But if—whatever this is—is going to continue, I have three ground rules.”

“Okay.”

“One: I’m not going to do this if you’re going to be squeamish about fucking a guy. I can’t be the one doing all the work here. I’ll show you what to do, but you have to do it.”

“No instructions necessary,” Matt said, saying a silent prayer to Elektra. “It’s 2015. It’s not just for men anymore.”

Peter laughed. “Well, damn. Three cheers for progress.”

“I’m sure I still have a few things to learn,” Matt allowed.

“And learn you shall,” Peter said. “The second thing is that I’m 100 percent out. I’m not going to rush you, but I’m not going to hide, either. Life is too short.” 

“Okay.” That made him nervous, but it was reasonable.

“And the third thing is that if things don’t work out—we keep it professional if we cross paths at night and we never, ever reveal the other’s identity, no matter what.”

“Well, I don’t want SHIELD to drop me in the RAFT over it, so consider that a given.”

“I am sorry about that,” Peter said. “I know it’s not fair.”

Matt shrugged. “Life’s not fair.”

“Can we return for a moment to the part where you like a bit of ass?”

“I like a bit of ass,” Matt said. His belly began to warm at the prospect and he nodded toward the bedroom. “If you want—”

“Not today,” Peter said.  

“No?” Matt said.

“No, I’m going to make you wait,” Peter said playfully, pressing his knee against Matt’s beneath the table. “I have a different game in mind.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. The Mets home opener is at noon today, and I have gone to every home opener since I was five. I thought maybe you’d like to come with?” Peter paused. “Unless you already have plans.”

“You really don’t want to—”

“I do,” Peter said, kissing him. “I can’t wait to. But you’ve just come out of your cocoon, you beautiful man. I don’t want to overwhelm you with my glory.”

“Bullshit,” Matt said. “You’re spooked.”

“A little bit,” Peter admitted.

“I’m a big boy, Pete,” Matt said. “I don’t ask for anything I don’t want.”

“I want to make sure you want it,” Peter said. “So we will discuss it tomorrow, okay?”

After breakfast, took the subway to Shea and bought bleacher seats. Peter bought hot dogs and nachos and they spent the hot afternoon eating junk and talking and mostly ignoring the Mets in a pleasantly drowsy, beery haze, and Matt found himself feeling more at home with Peter than he ever had with anyone else before.

When the game ended, Matt could not remember who had won. They rode the subway back towards town, but instead of hopping off the 7 in Long Island City, where he lived, Peter decided at the last minute to ride all the way back to Times Square with Matt, then walk with him back to Hell’s Kitchen. He followed Matt into the vestibule of his building where they finally parted with the longest, most absurdly romantic kiss of Matt’s life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trust me, y'all, they're the cutest. More chapters coming soon!
> 
> Edited to add: Got a bit of private feedback noting that Matt's breakup with Elektra diverges from the Netflix show. You're right! I always hated the Roscoe Sweeney episode--I know Matt is dumb when it comes to beautiful women with questionable ethics, but I just never could believe that he was SO dumb that he revealed his powers to Elektra without learning about her relationship to Stick. So in my conception, he learns that right away, and then the Black Sky reveal occurs in S2 as plotted. Thank you, carry on.


	7. Your Hand In Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buckle up, y'all, we're covering a lot of ground as our timelines finally converge.

**July 2018**

The days ground on into weeks in a strange timeless blur. He had no watch, no phone, no laptop, no books. There was a TV, at least, so he could find the news and a baseball game sometimes, but for the most part he just worked on regaining his strength, meditated, prayed.

At least his jangling nerve endings had finally calmed down—the ringing in his ears had subsided and he no longer felt like he was being electrocuted every time he touched something. But instead of recovering his perceptive abilities, a strange muffling numbness had set in that left him no better off than he had been when the pain was so loud it drowned everything else out.

Beyond no longer being able to sense the presence of objects around him, food tasted flat and surfaces seemed so too, as if he was wearing gloves that blunted every texture he encountered. He could no longer detect the minute changes of temperature that indicated the difference between the shade of a leaf and the sun, or the barometric shift that presaged a turn of the breeze. He could hear Frank and Karen moving around the loft just fine, but he could no longer hear them breathing on the other side of a closed door, or differentiate between their scents until they were nearby. He could independently confirm that his hearing was normal – he kept the TV at the same volume they did – but that’s all it was.

Normal, he realized, was no longer enough for him. He was starving for sensation. He held ice in his mouth until his teeth ached, ran the sink so hot his hands burned, forced himself to do pushups until his ribs threatened to crack again from the strain. He could barely eat unless he drowned his food in hot sauce and even then, he could only force enough down to keep himself from passing out. He masturbated more than he ever had as a teenager, trying to eke out some margin of pleasure or at least some kind of stimulus, but found that he could rarely stay hard enough to come, and when he did, it left him feeling more disappointed than relieved. How did people ever live in this flat, blank world?

Karen, Frank, and Claire tried to hide their worry about him in their own ways, but he had known them all too long to be fooled. Karen wallowed in false optimism, trying to keep him busy with pointless work decisions, pretending as though each case they referred out would be their last. Frank favored distraction, dragging him downstairs to the makeshift gym he’d set up among the leftover baby grands or schooling him in chess or trying to get Matt to teach him how to play the piano. But the worst was Claire, and the pointedly neutral “Ok, good,” she said every time he failed to perceive something he could have perceived before in one of her tests.

“That wasn’t good,” Matt said.

“You’re alive. You’re not getting worse,” she said coolly. “Compared to the others—that’s good.”

Grief haunted him as the reality of their losses set in. Jessica’s ghost was a near-constant presence at Karen and Matt’s increasingly shorter morning meetings about work. A broken glass elicited a “Sweet Christmas” from Karen that shook them all with tearful laughter. A dinner of Chinese takeout summoned the memory of a lecture by Danny on the proper use of chopsticks while Colleen looked on far more tolerantly than he deserved. There was a Chevy commercial featuring Trish’s favorite song that destroyed him every time it came on.

Other times it would just come out of nowhere—just raw, formless grief, with no specific memory attached to it—and swamp him for hours.

“It gets easier, Red,” Frank said one night, finding Matt brooding in the living room well after midnight one night.  “Not better, but easier.”

* * *

**Late Spring 2015**

He ended up having wait to see Peter again longer than either one of them would have liked. Avengers business took Peter overseas early Monday morning—Matt awoke to his text and responded but received no answer. He spent the next dozen days in an anxious fog, patrolling Manhattan late into the night because he couldn’t sleep anyway. How long would Peter be gone? Would he be able to call during the mission? Would he want to? If he got hurt or killed, would he ever know? Why didn’t he make love to Peter when he had the chance? Was this just an elaborate ghosting scheme? Or would the mission somehow make him reevaluate his choices, make him realize that relationships would just hold him back?

And then when he was in bed, memories of what they’d done there would come rushing back, and his cock would spring to attention, sometimes waking him up. He couldn’t remember wanting someone as much as he wanted Peter since, well, Karen. He ached for him.

Finally, blessedly, a text arrived around 1 a.m. on the following Saturday, just as Matt returned from his patrol: _Home now. Come over?_

It was after two when Peter met him at the door with a wordless kiss. He took Matt’s hand in his, led him inside and lightly kicked the door shut behind them.

“You okay?” Matt asked.

“Very,” Peter said. “All I can say about it is that it was a textbook op—no casualties, no injuries, all the players behind bars, a world a little bit safer for humanity.”

“Not bad for a couple week’s work,” Matt said.

“It doesn’t always go like that, but when it does—” Peter stepped in close, pressing his pelvis against Matt’s. He was already half-erect, and that made Matt begin to harden too. He ducked his head into the curve of Peter’s neck and breathed deeply the scent of him—his skin and sweat and soap—and felt his heart begin to pound as decades of denial began to shed away, revealing a new rawness he had never allowed himself to feel. How had he ever gone so long without this?

“It’s worth celebrating,” Matt said, kissing his neck.

“Yes.”

He followed Peter into the bedroom, where they undressed between quick, light kisses. Matt’s fingers flew across Peter’s shoulders and chest and back, reacquainting himself with the soft velvet of his skin, the smooth shellac of old scars, and the tender swell of newer ones.

“I haven't been able to stop thinking about you,” Matt murmured, kissing his collarbones. “I want to fuck you every way I can.”

“Good,” Peter said, turning around and pressing his backside against Matt’s cock, letting it rest erect against the cleft as he guided Matt’s hand down to his own cock. He slowly—agonizingly slowly—circled his hips against Matt, holding Matt’s hand still but firm. His breath quickened as he moved, and after a few moments, he squeezed his buttocks, gripping Matt’s cock between them, then turning back to kiss him as he released him and climbed into bed.

Matt climbed on top of him, pinning Peter’s hands above his head and kissing him deeply. After a few light bites on his neck, he released Peter’s hands in order to move down to his chest, circling and nibbling each nipple in turn, eliciting increasingly ragged sighs. He worked his way down Peter’s belly, tonguing his navel, feeling the damp tip of Peter’s cock press urgently against the soft part beneath his chin.

“You’re ready for something,” Matt observed.

“Fuck, yes,” Peter breathed.

“You’ve got quite a mouth on you,” Matt said, kissing said mouth. “Turn over." As Peter obeyed, Matt lightly swatted his ass, and Peter looked over his shoulder and grinned. "You like that," Matt said, swatting his other cheek as Peter reached into the nightstand for a small bottle of lube and a condom. 

Matt kissed the sensitive spot at the top of his cleft and flicked his tongue down into it, acquainting himself with the indisputable maleness of his scent and taste, the deeper funk of it, smoky and a little sour. He dipped his fingers into the lube and gently inserted one, kissing the small of Peter’s back as he did so.

“More,” Peter said, so he added another, gently working the muscle loose, adding a third when he seemed ready for it, massaging and stretching, kissing Peter’s back as he worked.

“I’m ready,” Peter said. 

Matt rolled the condom on, slicked it with lube, and eased himself in. It was a tight fit, but not impossible. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Peter said hoarsely. “Just hang out there for a minute.” Matt could feel Peter working and relaxing his muscles against him, helping him slide in a little further with each pulse. Then he began to move his hips and eventually Matt felt him give way just a little more—just enough.

“You can move now,” Peter said, and Matt did. Slowly at first, finding his way, learning Peter’s body, inventorying the sighs and shivers and sharp intakes of breath for future reference. He shifted his weight a little so he could reach around Peter’s hips with his already-slick hand and wrap it around Peter’s cock, working it in time with the rhythm of his hips. “Fuck, yes,” Peter sighed.

It was the strangest sensation, as if Peter’s cock had somehow become his, Peter’s pleasure melding seamlessly with his own. They moved more urgently now, too soon but they didn’t care, their patience utterly lost now as the private feedback loop of sensation drowning out any other thought but climax. Peter came first, with a deep groan, and then Matt came a minute or so later.

They gently disengaged and collapsed on the bed, and Peter laughed. “No girlfriend taught you _that."_  

“I improvised,” he said. “Hope it was okay.”

“That was extremely okay,” Peter said.

“What, not amazing?” Matt teased.

“Like you said, you still have a few things to learn,” Peter said, straddling him and kissing him. “But I had fun and you had fun and that’s all that matters.”

In the morning—which dawned barely two hours later—they lay in bed for a long time lazily exploring each other’s bodies, both drifting in and out of half-erections as they roused and dozed until midmorning, when they both became too hungry to ignore.

They went to an unfashionable 24-hour diner around the corner from Peter’s apartment that was never crowded on a Saturday morning. They took a booth in the back and ordered enormous omelets and endless coffee while Peter summarized that morning’s _Bulletin._

“Not the _Bugle_?”

“I hate to say it, but the _Bulletin_ just has better headlines,” Peter said. “‘Sleeping With the Dishes: Celebrity chef found living in restaurant after wife kicks him out’ or ‘Blazing Tattles: Inside disgraced banker’s scorched-earth campaign against ex-boss.’ Honestly, why anyone would want to read anything else defies explanation.”

Near noon, they began to get exasperated looks from the waitress, even though no one was waiting for a table, so they paid and then, having no particular desire to go their separate ways, made their way up to Queensbridge Park.

“How much are you using your powers right now?” Peter asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe 10 percent?” (If only he knew then how wrong he was.)

“That little?”

“It’s enough.”

“To do what?”

“To keep my antenna up for trouble, like an oncoming car or that trash can you almost walked me into.” (And the bikes coursing up and down the riverfront path, and the progress of the Little League game taking place in the diamond to their right, and the hot dog cart up and to the left, and the family trying to wrangle several toddlers on the playground they’d just passed, and the teenage lovers courting a public indecency misdemeanor beneath the tree their left and, and, and, and.)

“Oof. Sorry.”

“And I’m paying attention to your face, and your heartbeat”—Peter smiled at that—"but otherwise, you’re driving.” (But just barely.)

“I promise not to go mad with power,” Peter joked. “But I have to say, it’s really nice to be able to walk arm in arm with someone in this neighborhood without anyone staring at us.”

“They’re staring,” Matt said, tapping his cane against Peter’s leg. “Just for different reasons.”

“Does it bother you?”

“I’m not crazy about it, but knowing I could kick their asses without breaking a sweat does take away some of the sting.”

“But we can’t kick their asses,” Peter said. “Not as we are right now.”

“Well, it’s not worth starting a fight over, so it’s kind of moot.”

“Oh, you _are_ new at this,” Peter said. “When you’re out with another man, it’s usually not you starting the fight. Not in Queens, anyway.”

“No, I guess not.”

“And I can’t afford to get into fights when I’m out of uniform,” Peter said. “I’m too skinny to get away with winning.”

“I’ve had to take a few hits myself,” Matt commiserated. “It’s not fun.”

“But it’s not just me I have to worry about,” Peter said. “My sophomore year of high school, my boyfriend and I got jumped in a subway station. We were horsing around on the platform, waiting for the train, and I kissed him, and it turned out we weren’t alone. And the worst part was that I let Marco take the beating too. I had just gotten my spider bite a few weeks before and I didn't know what to do--I was too afraid to be discovered to fight back.” He shook his head. "That's always going to be something I wish I'd done differently."

"I'm so sorry that happened to you," Matt said. “You were just a kid, though. There's no way you could have had it all figured out.”

“Regardless, a no-PDA policy has served me very well since,” Peter said. “But I didn’t realize how much I missed it until you came along.”

“I get what you’re saying, but please don’t ever mistake me holding your arm like this for PDA,” Matt said coolly. "There's a lot of people in the world who think I just do this as an excuse to grope people and you need to not be one of them."

 "Oh my god, I would never--why would anyone think that?"

"Because they think having a disability makes you unfuckable and that this the only way I can get my rocks off," Matt said quietly. "I don’t feel super great about all the compromises I make to hide my powers, but I’ll be damned if I use any of them to take advantage of anyone like that.”

“That's horrible,” Peter said. “I’m so, so sorry. I didn't think that idea through well enough.”

“I’m not angry. I’m glad we had the conversation. It’s important that you understand,” Matt said. “And now I understand why you feel the way you feel, too. I didn’t realize how much I took for granted.”

“Now that we understand each other better, let me start over,” Peter said. “I’m enjoying our day together.”

“So am I,” Matt said, squeezing his arm. “ _That_ was PDA, by the way.”

Peter grinned. "How could anyone not want to fuck you, anyway? You're hot as hell."

Matt blushed and laughed. "Please, don't stop."

"And modest too, I see."

They spent the afternoon in the park, dozing in the grass and eating ice cream on a bench overlooking the East River and listening to the buskers playing violins and guitars and cellos along the paths. “I love this city,” Peter said. “It’s cheesy, I know, but this,” he waved around him, “the parks and the skyscrapers and the river and the bridges and the trains—is what home means for me. It's not perfect, but I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

“Me neither.”

“I want it to feel like home for everyone who lives here. Is that stupid? I want everyone to feel like this is their city, that it was built for them,” Peter said. “That’s why I don’t live upstate with the other Avengers. New York is always going to be my priority.”

Eventually the sun began to set and they grew hungry again. They ate dinner at a little Mexican place that was little more than a convenience store with a few tables in back before heading back toward Peter’s apartment.

“I should patrol,” Matt said reluctantly, as they passed a subway station.

“Yeah, me too,” Peter said, just as reluctantly.

“Come over when you’re done,” Matt said. “Or tomorrow. Whenever you want.”

Peter smiled shyly. “I’d like that.”

“Okay, then,” Matt said, biting his lip to keep from kissing Peter on the crowded corner. Instead slid his hand down Peter’s arm and quickly squeezed his hand and then finally turned to leave.

* * *

**Summer 2015**

He didn’t tell Karen about Peter until late July. She suspected that he’d been seeing someone, of course—he’d been happier and looser, especially after he and Pete began sleeping together. It felt as though all the spillways at Hoover Dam had been thrown open and he was making up for two decades of un-had sex, fucking Pete’s sweet, beautiful ass until he collapsed breathless and quivering with pleasure. He had even performed his first blow job, which had gone less smoothly but which he was getting better at.

Finally, after a deliriously debauched weekend in which they’d only taken brief breaks from the bed to eat or suit up for a quick patrol of their territories, he returned to work too giddy to hide it anymore.

She had simply laughed and said, “I know.”

Telling Foggy was harder. Discovering that Matt was Daredevil—and more importantly, that Matt had been lying to Foggy about his abilities—had driven a wedge between them that had taken years to repair. This was now the second time Matt would have to tell his best friend that he was not what Foggy thought he was.

But he couldn’t make Karen keep this secret forever, so that night he poured three fingers of scotch and dialed Foggy’s number.

Foggy had been surprised but happy to hear from him, realizing that it had been more than six months since they’d last spoken. Still, Foggy could read him like a book, and he knew from the sound of Matt’s voice that something was up. After regaling Matt with a few tales of K Street skullduggery he asked Matt flat out what was on his mind.

“What’s going on with you, man?” he asked. “You’ve been dancing around something from the minute you called.”

“Well,” Matt said. “I have some news.”

“That sounds momentous,” Foggy said.

“I am…seeing someone,” Matt said slowly. Jesus, this was hard to say.

“Mazel tov,” Foggy said. “You’re always seeing someone. Is this one serious?”

“It’s got potential,” Matt said. _Fuck it._ “His name is Peter.”

Foggy laughed.

“I’m not kidding.”

“Wait, what?” Foggy asked. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Fog,” Matt said.

“Oh my god,” Foggy said. “You’re serious.”

“Yes,” Matt said. “For the love of Christ, please believe me because I’m dying here.”

“Huh.” Foggy was quiet for a long time. “I still love you, buddy, but—what the fuck, Matt? You’re 40 years old and you’re just figuring this out now?”

“He's a good man, Fog. You'd like him."

“All right then,” Foggy said. “Then I guess—tell me about him.”

* * *

**July 2018**

Peter called when he could, but they never talked for long—Matt would not tell him how damaged he was and Peter, he knew, couldn’t share many details about the mission. Since there was no other topic that mattered to them right now, there wasn’t much to say besides “I love you.”

But then, incongruously, delightfully, perversely, there came another call around five in the morning. Karen had burst into Matt’s room and shaken him awake and held the phone on speaker between them.

“Okay, Foggy, he’s here,” she said. “Now you can tell us.”

“It’s a girl,” he said. “The world as we know it has ended because Foggy Nelson is the father of a daughter.”

Karen hugged Matt and kissed him on the cheek. “What’s her name? Is she perfect? How’s Marcie? You have to send us a picture!”

“Marcie’s fine, we’re naming her Alice, she’s seven pounds, eleven ounces, 21 and a quarter inches long, her eyes are blue, her hair is red, and thank God her hair color is the only thing she got from me.”

“That’s amazing, Fog,” Matt said, sleep still scratching his throat. “I’m so happy for you guys.”

“I wish we could be there,” Karen said.

“We’ll bring her up when everything calms down,” Foggy said. “We’re going to baptize her at St. Mike’s, and Matt, we’d like you to be her godfather.”

“I live in mortal sin, Foggy.”

“Like we give a fuck,” Foggy said. “And Father Joe said it doesn't matter. Please just say yes.”

“Yes, of course,” Matt said. “I’d be honored.”

* * *

  **October 2017**

The wedding had come together quickly late last October, less than a month after Marcie discovered she was pregnant, but even on such short notice, Foggy and Marcie had managed to fill most of St. Michael’s. (Though to be fair, the Nelsons alone, with seven adult kids, their spouses, and their children, took up more than a quarter of the church.)

Matt had always envied Foggy’s enormous family, probably because he no longer had any of his own. Even with all the inevitable fights and drama, it seemed miraculous that anyone could have so many people in the world who loved you.

And then the wedding began, and Matt’s heart took a surprise tumble in his chest as Marcie entered the church and Foggy knuckled a stray tear from his eye. It wasn’t his first wedding, of course, but it was the first time he’d stood up for the groom, and he found the experience unexpectedly moving. He couldn’t help but notice that Peter’s heartbeat quickened when Marcie’s dad handed her off to Foggy, who murmured “You look amazing” in a voice so soft only Marcie, Matt, and Peter could hear.

Peter had been living with him for more than a year at that point—long enough for them to have fallen into a familiar domestic routine, but not yet long enough for Matt to stop wondering at the miracle of it all. He hoped he never would. It had been easier for Peter, he supposed—he’d lived with another man before, had always known he'd share his life with. What was Peter feeling now? Anticipation? Anxiety? Matt couldn’t tell.

Whatever it was, Peter was totally relaxed and cheerful when Marcie’s maid of honor handed Matt off to him outside the church after it was all over.

“How’d I do?” he asked as Peter handed him his cane and planted a quick kiss on his cheek.

“I couldn’t keep my eyes off you,” he murmured into Matt’s ear. “I always liked you in a tux.”

“Game time,” Matt said quietly, because Father Joe was approaching.

“Good to see you, Matthew,” he said. “And this is—”

“Father, this is Peter,” Matt said. Then, though Father Joe didn't need the clarification, he wanted Peter to know he wasn't afraid to say it: “My boyfriend.”

Father Joe didn’t miss a beat, but extended his hand and said, “It’s good to meet you at last, Peter. Maybe Matthew can bring you to Mass sometime.”

Peter took it graciously. “Well, I’m Jewish, but thank you for the invitation.”

“The church's door is always open,” Father Joe said with a wink. “You’re welcome to visit anytime.” Then, to Matt, “Franklin looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. I’m glad he decided to come back to us for this day.”

“Me too,” Matt said. “New York’s not the same without him.”

“I love seeing childhood friends stand up for each other at their weddings,” Father Joe said. “Sometimes the Church puts so much emphasis on the family God gives you that it can be forgetful of the families people forge for themselves. But you know, the first book of Samuel has a lot to say on the subject—that’s Old Testament, Peter, so you may be familiar with it. Chapter 18, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I know the story of David and Jonathan,” said Peter, placing his hand in the small of Matt’s back and glancing at Matt, who was struggling to process the fact that his priest and his Jewish boyfriend were casually discussing scriptural references to homosexuality like two people at a cocktail party discovering they had a mutual friend.

If Father Joe noticed his discomfort, he gave no sign that Matt could detect. But he reached out with both arms, gripping Matt’s right and Peter’s left as if to bless them both, before excusing himself to sign the marriage license.

“So did I pass the test?” Peter whispered. “Because I kind of think I passed the test.”

“You studied up for that just in case, didn’t you.”

“What? I like to come prepared,” Peter said with a grin.

The reception was only 15 blocks away and not due to start for an hour, so they joined Karen and Frank—who, after a bit of plastic surgery, had been moving freely around the city as Pete Castiglione—and walked to the restaurant so they could enjoy the brisk October evening and the rare fun of taking a stroll through the city in fancy clothes.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Karen mused. “For a little while we’re normal people with normal lives, going to a wedding like normal people do.”

“It’s a good reminder of why we do what we do,” Peter agreed. “This is what we protect.”

“God, please stop, you two. I’m choking on all the virtue here,” Frank said gruffly, but Karen laughed.

It wasn’t until they got to the restaurant that Matt was able to appreciate how many familiar people were in the room. Old friends from college and law school, a few former fellow interns from Landman and Zack, Brett Mahoney and his wife Tiana. Foggy and Marcie both had a gift for maintaining relationships that Matt had never fully mastered, he realized, and that made him a little sad. Aside from Frank and Karen, he rarely saw any of these people except by accident or in court.

And not one of them knew he was living with a man now. “Can you get me a drink?” he asked Peter. “I think this is going to be a long night.”

No sooner had Peter returned with a beer than he understood why.

“Peter, this is Lauren and Daniel. Lauren went to law school with us,” Matt said, introducing him to the couple he was talking to. Then he gestured toward Peter. “My boyfriend, Peter.”

“Ah,” Lauren said. It wasn’t a judgmental “ah,” just a surprised one. She recovered instantly and flashed a big smile. “So nice to meet you.”

Nearly a dozen startled-but-polite “ah’s” and “oh’s” and “huh’s” later, Matt was exhausted. “This is so awkward. Honestly, if you want to go—”

“I’m not going anywhere and you shouldn’t either,” Peter said. “The way you present yourself, people are always going to assume you’re straight.”

“Oh, honey,” Matt said. “I’m blind. Most people assume I’m still a virgin.”

“Well, we’ll just have to disabuse them of that notion posthaste,” Peter said. “Sit tight.”

He left to have a quick word with the DJ, and by the time he got back to the table, the first bars of an overplayed Sam Smith song began to play and couples began to make their way to the dance floor. Peter leaned over and murmured into Matt’s ear: “May I have this dance?”

“God, no. This song is so cheesy,” Matt said, shaking his head but finding it impossible not to smile.

“Because it’s wonderful and perfect,” Peter said. “Take my hand.”

It didn’t surprise Matt at all that Peter was an excellent dancer, not that he'd ever danced enough to know the difference. There was something shockingly intimate about being held that closely in front of so many people, Peter’s arm around his waist, his arm hooked around Peter’s shoulder, their free hands clasped between their chests. In a delicious role reversal for them, Peter led, insofar as anyone led these days anymore, and Matt allowed himself to surrender the moment, allowing Peter to guide him around the floor with nothing but the gentle pressure of a hand or a hip against his own. It was enough to make him forget the eyes on him.

“You’re making me a little weak in the knees, lover,” Matt said.

Peter brushed his nose against Matt’s. “Good.”

By the time the music ended, Matt was tempted to take Peter into the nearest bathroom to finish what he’d started, but he settled for a kiss that lasted a _skoshe_ longer than was technically necessary.

There were no more “ah’s” after that.

Much later that night, Foggy was finally able to disengage from his family to spend a few minutes at Matt and Peter’s table. They were drunk and loose and full-hearted, but Matt was also a little melancholy knowing that this would never be his. No matter how tolerant Father Joe was, he would never be allowed to say a wedding mass for Matt and Peter. Certainly not in his lifetime, and probably not in Matt’s either. This was the closest he could get.

“Matthew,” Foggy said with mock seriousness, pointing at Peter. “I like this man of yours. I don’t know what the hell happened to you, but I like him and I think you’re good together and who am I to question the mysteries of love?”

“I mean, Marcie fell for you, so I guess anything’s possible, right?” Matt teased.

“To all the possibilities,” Foggy said, raising a glass.

“To all the possibilities,” Peter echoed, raising his glass. Matt laughed and raised his and Foggy struck it so hard, half of it splashed on the table. Foggy was unconcerned.

“I’m going to be a dad, Matt,” Foggy said, wonderingly. “Marcie Stahl is having my baby. I’m living my favorite wet dream from law school.”

“This was your favorite wet dream?”

“What can I say? I’m a sentimental guy,” Foggy said expansively, standing and planting a fat kiss on Matt’s forehead. “You should try it sometime,” he said as he stepped away. “Tie the knot. Adopt some rugrats. Domesticate a little.”

“I’ll tell the Pope to get right on that,” Matt laughed.

He’d broken Peter’s heart a little that night, but the miracle of it was that Peter had laughed as though _of course he knew_ marriage was off the table and kissed him and said brightly, “I don’t need a piece of paper to know you’re mine, Matty.”

And suddenly Matt realized what had happened, and didn’t know how to fix it, so he just said stupidly, “Good, because you’re never getting rid of me.”

But things had never been quite the same after that—it was a hairline crack between them, just beneath the paint, something you could barely see but could detect if you ran a thumbnail across it. And then, before Matt could find a way to repair the damage he’d done, Hominus showed up, and Peter had to leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading so far! We're going to be in the present day from here on out, so you'll stop seeing the date identifiers. Next up: Coping with fallout is hard.


	8. The Vigil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's go-time for the Avengers. Matt is bad at waiting. We're in the present day from here on out.

**Early August 2018**

“Dinner’s ready,” Claire said.

Matt nodded, but didn’t stop pacing. He’d been walking back and forth down the length of the loft for more than half an hour. It was the last day of July, almost six weeks since the neon factory explosion, and SHIELD had finally completed its silent tunnel through the mountain into a disused storage enclosure built into the side of a dilapidated barn on the far west side of the compound. Thunderstorms were predicted over the area, which they hoped would mask the midnight infiltration long enough for them to penetrate as far as they could into the complex before they were spotted, but of course it would make the fighting harder.

“Matt,” Karen said, touching his shoulder. “Come sit with us. Please. You’re making us nervous.”

“Sorry,” Matt muttered. “Sure.”

They joined Claire at the table, where she dished out plates of rice, beans, stewed chicken, and salad. “Dominican comfort food,” she said. “I figured we needed a little abuelita love tonight.”

“It looks delicious, Claire. Thank you,” Karen said. And then, a few silent minutes later: “Matt, you need to eat. It’s going to be a long night.”

He dutifully dug into the flavorless (to him) spread, indifferently forcing down whatever his fork happened to find first. “Thanks for cooking,” he mumbled between bites. But he soon pushed his plate away.

“Matt—” Karen said.

“It’s okay,” said Claire. “It’s better the next day anyway.”

“What time is it now?” he asked for what must have been the fifth time that evening.

“Almost eight,” Claire said.

He nodded and began absently tapping his hand—until Karen stopped it with her own.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I feel like I should be there too,” Claire said. “If it goes bad—”

“You’ll be the only doctor left in the country who knows mutant physiology,” Karen said. “They’ll need you more than ever.”

“If it goes bad, there won’t be any mutants left alive to treat,” Matt said icily.

“You are,” said Karen.

“For all the good I am right now.”

“Okay, forget dinner,” Claire said, clearing the plates. She returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Frank’s bourbon and three glasses.

“To Peter, Frank, Misty, and Colleen,” she said.

“Cheers,” Matt said, downing his in a single swallow.

After a while the waiting began to wear on all of them. “I wish we could listen in on the radio,” Claire said. “It could be hours before anyone can call us.”

“I don’t,” Karen said. “It would just make me feel worse about not being able to help.”

“Aren’t the Mets playing tonight?” Matt asked suddenly. “Turn on the game.”

“Are you kidding?” Karen asked.

“We need to pass the time somehow,” Matt said. “The silence is killing me.”

“Okay,” Claire said. She switched on the game and Karen brought beer over from the fridge and they curled up on the sofa, trying and failing to care about anything except the raid that was about to happen 400 miles to the north.

But eventually Matt fell into a kind of trance, lulled by the rhythm of the game, occasionally rousing when there was a broken bat or a home run, but largely unaware of who was on base, which team was at bat, what inning it was or even what the score was. Mostly he was thinking about Peter, that first Sunday together, the April sun burning their skin and baking the scent of sweat and nachos and beer and last night’s wine and sex and the coppery taste of each other’s mouths into his memory forever.

Suddenly he was overcome with a sense of grief so powerful that he knew with every cell of his body that Peter was dead. It was a terrible plan, he realized: All Hominus had to do was flood the tunnel with the gas and he could wipe out every mutant SHIELD had on its side without firing a single shot. Why hadn’t he realized it sooner? Why hadn’t he said something? How could he just let his beloved march to his death like that? What was wrong with him?

He got up and stumbled to the bathroom and turned on the sink and then pressed his face against the cool tile of the bathroom wall, trying to still his breath and steady his heart.

Then, as if to make everything worse, he heard Stick as clearly as if he was standing in the bathroom with him. _You believe he’s dead because you’re afraid he’s dead. But the biggest liar in the world is fear, Matty. Reason, skill, and strength—those are your allies. Fear’s just an asshole that wants to ruin your day._

_I thought you always said only idiots weren’t afraid._

_I didn’t say you shouldn’t feel fear, Matty. Just that you shouldn’t believe everything it tells you. When does the raid begin?_

_Midnight._

_What time is it now?_

_I don’t know._

_The game is still on, right?_

_Yeah._

_So if the game started at eight, it’s probably not much later than eleven. How can he be gone if the raid hasn’t even begun? Reason, Matty._

Matt nodded against the tile, then turned and splashed water on his face. The pep talk from the long-dead didn’t really make him feel any better, but he dried his face and went back out into the living room.

“What’s wrong, Matt?” Karen asked.

“Just worried.” Matt shrugged. “What time is it?”

“Quarter to eleven.”

“How much longer do you think it will be?” Claire asked.

“It could be a while,” Matt said. “There are several buildings to clear.”

“Fuuuuuuuck,” Karen groaned. “I hate this.”

“I’m going to go wait it out in my room,” Matt said. “Just—come get me when you have news.”

* * *

Frank had left for the compound early that morning, and Peter had called not long after.

“I only have a minute,” he said. “I just—I need to tell you how much I love you.”

“I know, babe.” Matt pressed his hand against his mouth. When he trusted himself to speak again, he said, “I love you too. More than anything.”

“I’ll see you on the other side, okay?” Pete said. “I promise.”

Whether he meant the other side of the battle or the other side of life, Matt didn’t want to consider. “Go,” he said, clearing his throat. “Watch your back. I love you.”

“I love you.”

Neither hung up right away. Instead, they listened to each other breathe for a moment longer, until finally Matt summoned the strength to end the call. 

He regretted doing that, now—being the first to hang up. He’d meant to make it easier for Peter to go and do what he needed to do, but now if Peter died tonight the last thing he would have heard from Matt was his hanging up on him.

“Stop,” Matt said softly to himself. He scooped his rosary off the nightstand and knelt by the bed.

“Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

_Stop being so melodramatic, Matty. What did I tell you about personal attachments?_

_Go to hell, Stick._

_You didn’t mind so much when I was talking you off the ledge twenty minutes ago._

_Learn how to read a fucking room, Stick. This is not what I want to hear right now._

_You want a fairytale to reassure you that everything’s going to be okay, go read your little holy book of stories. You want the truth, use your reason, skill, and strength. Let me know when you’re in the mood for the truth._

Matt ignored him and picked up his rosary again. “Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

Time passed, though he had no idea how much. He had knelt until his feet began to go numb, then he lay down on the carpet and held the rosary to his chest as a billion regrets began to pour over him.

Every stupid fight they’d ever had seemed to be replaying simultaneously in a cacophony of angry words and angrier silences. The thrown coffee cup. Every little lie he’d told about working late or meeting a client just because he needed a break from Peter’s perpetual sunshine to glower and brood over something. Every excuse he’d made not to take a vacation, lest Hell’s Kitchen burn down if he dared to take more than a night off. They had never even so much as spent the day at Coney Island.

_I’ll tell the Pope to get right on that._

“You’re such a goddamn idiot, Murdock,” Matt said aloud.

For the first time he began to wonder what he would truly have of Peter’s to remember him by. He had no recording of Peter’s voice—he used his phone for work too much to be able to save phone messages for any length of time. How long would he remember his laugh, or his tuneless humming when he had his earbuds in and his music up too loud to hear himself, or the primal “fuck, yeah,” he groaned every time he came? How long would his clothes still smell like him? How long would he remember the taste of his mouth or the shape of his hands or the weight of him sleeping in the bed beside him?

Peter had said “I love you” first. Actually, what he’d said was, “That’s why I love you,” after Matt recounted a particularly masterful legal argument that he’d made in court as they walked to dinner one night.

They had only been together for about six months at that point, and Matt was almost positive it had been an accident, so he’d just laughed it off and asked, “What else do you love about me?”

“I didn’t say I love it about you,” Peter said. “I said I love you.”

Matt had blushed and turned away, suddenly shy. He’d recently noticed his own feelings turning in that direction as well, but he hadn’t been ready to voice them yet.

“I’m 15 years older than you,” he said instead.

“Thirteen, and I don’t care about that,” Peter said. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same way. I know you do.”

Matt was quiet for the better part of a minute as he mulled his response. Dating Peter was one thing, but loving him meant potentially sharing a life with him, which meant spending the rest of his life in conflict with the Church. And that possibility was something he hadn’t reconciled yet.

Well, he had the rest of his life to work on that. “I do,” he said. “I love you.” He laughed as he said it, an almost adolescent giddiness bubbling up through him. “You make me so happy.”

“I know,” Peter said, then laughed at his words. “I mean, me too. You make me happy. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

If Peter died tonight, how long would it take for him to slip into the same fog of intangibility Elektra or his father had? A year? Five?

_Please, God, I just need more time with him. I’ll give you anything you want. Just let him live._

_You already gave up eternal salvation for him, Matty, I don’t know what else your magic man in the sky wants from you._

_Fuck off, Stick._

_He’s never taken a life. Can he, if he has to?_

_They’re doing everything they can to minimize casualties._

_That’s not what I asked._

_He’ll do whatever he has to do._

_And afterward? Will he be the same man? What if he survives and you lose him anyway? Would it still be worth it?_

_Go away, Stick._

_Would it?_

“Matt?” Karen said softly, knocking as she opened the door. “I’ve got Maria Hill on the phone.”


	9. This Hole In Your Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avengers' raid on Hominus' compound goes badly. There are casualties. Please note that this chapter includes a graphic scene of war at the end.

“Matt?” Karen said softly, knocking as she opened the door. “I’ve got Maria Hill on the phone.”

Matt’s guts turned to ice. “Is it done?”

“Yeah,” she said, sitting next to him. “Maria, Matt’s here so I’m putting you on speaker,” she said, and the phone erupted in a burst of static between them. “Can you hear us?” she asked.

“Loud and clear, babe,” Frank said, and Karen let out a shattered laugh.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm not as pretty as I used to be, but it's a six-pack and a kiss from my best girl won't fix,” he said. “And Matt?”

“Yeah,” Matt said.

“Your boy is fine,” Frank said. “He’s helping secure the weapons right now but I’m bringing him home to you tomorrow morning, yeah? He sends his love.”

* * *

The next morning was hot and humid, the funk of wilted produce and raw meat from the Hunts Point market upwind mixed with the acid stink of the wastewater treatment plant half a mile away, but Matt didn’t care. It had been nearly two months since he had stepped outside, and he could feel his skin practically drinking in the forgotten sun. He felt more alive than he had in weeks.

Too anxious to stand still, Karen had walked up to the end of the block to keep watch for Frank’s van. They were a few minutes late—nothing that couldn’t have been explained by rush hour traffic on the BQE—but after the last few months and no sleep the night before, it was hard not to catastrophize anymore.

But suddenly Karen whooped and sprinted back to Matt and Claire at the warehouse entrance. “They’re coming!”

“How do I look?” Matt asked.

Claire laughed. “Exhausted, in desperate need of a shave, and ten years older, and to him, you will be the most beautiful thing in the world,” she said, pushing his hair off his brow and then patting his chest.

Then the van was pulling up and doors were opening on every side and people were piling out and talking all at once—Misty, Colleen, Frank, and finally Peter.

Claire peeled off with Misty and Colleen while Karen threw herself into Frank’s arms with a cry.

And then Peter was there, and his arms were around Matt and Matt held onto him as though his life depended on it.

Then Peter kissed him deeply and stepped back and ran a thumb along Matt’s jaw through his new beard.

“The grizzly bear look suits you,” he said, attempting a cheerful tone that didn’t quite succeed. “When did you get this gray?”

“June, I think.” He reached out to touch Peter’s face, trying to relearn it with his diminished sense of touch, searching out the curve of his eyebrow and the plane of his cheek and the narrow cleft of his Cupid’s bow.

“The gas did something to me,” Matt said softly. “I, ah, I can’t--”

“I know,” Peter said, hugging Matt again. “You’re alive. That’s all that matters.”

Matt hoped it was true.

* * *

Back upstairs, it became clear that it had been a victory that didn’t feel much like one. Even Matt could sense the grim frowns and slumped shoulders as everyone gathered around the table to quietly pick at a breakfast that largely went ignored.

“How did it go?” Matt asked. His left hand was on Peter’s knee under the table, and he felt Peter’s leg tense under his touch.

After a long silence, Frank spoke. “Ugly. Not many survivors.”

“Hominus?”

“Dead too,” Peter said quietly, crossing his leg so Matt would have to remove his hand.

“We secured an entire tank of the gas, though,” Colleen said quickly. “Maybe they can figure out an antidote.”

“Good,” Matt said. “Yeah, thank you.”

But instead of improving the mood, it only made things more awkward as everyone fell silent to, Matt was certain, stare at him. A pointed cough from Misty confirmed it.

His appetite lost, he excused himself to go back to his room to pack.

“I’ll help,” Peter said, standing too.

“No, eat. I got it,” Matt said, waving him away, but almost immediately he tripped over Frank’s gun case leaning against the sofa behind him.

A collective gasp came from the table but Peter quickly closed the distance and grabbed his arm before he could fall.

“Why do you all have to be such fucking slobs?” Peter asked the group angrily.

“Pete,” Matt said quietly. “It’s fine. Let’s just pack up and go home, okay?”

Back in Matt’s room, with the door closed, Matt banished Peter to the bed while he bustled around the room and bathroom, collecting his things. He needed to show Peter that he was fine, that he didn’t need anyone’s help, that after all he’d been blind for more than 30 years and he totally had this.

That didn’t stop Peter from unpacking and repacking Matt’s suitcase every time Matt added something to it. That was just Peter being Peter after a bad mission, micromanaging everything within reach. But after the fourth time, Matt placed his hands on Peter’s to stop him.

“We’re less than seven miles from home, babe,” he said softly, kissing Peter on the forehead. “This will do.”

Peter nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

An hour and a half later, Matt and Peter were unlocking the door to their apartment for the first time in seven weeks. Fortunately, when Karen had come to get his clothes, she also cleaned out the fridge and threw away the fruit that had begun to rot in the bowl on the kitchen table, but the apartment still smelled stale and dusty. But despite the close smell, it felt enormous, yawning blankly ahead of him as he tried to reconstruct his mental map of the furniture.

“Home sweet home,” Peter said, dropping Matt’s arm. “I better open some windows.”

While Peter did that, Matt felt his way over to the kitchen to get a glass of water and take an inventory of what food remained in the kitchen. There were still unopened jars and cans in the pantry, but his sense of smell could no longer tell him what was inside them without opening them. The peanut butter jar he recognized, and the little cans of tuna, and he was pretty sure about a jar of pasta sauce. The boxes were easier—cereal, spaghetti, something he was pretty sure sounded like crackers.

The breeze through the windows was hot, but it helped.

“I should probably start some laundry,” Peter said, bustling into the bedroom. “Those clothes have been in the basket for almost two months, and I might just have to throw away some of those towels….”

Matt couldn’t have cared less about the laundry or the towels—all he wanted to do was fall directly into bed with Peter to make love and nap and fuck some more, until they were sticky and starving and even then they’d order a pizza so they’d only have to put their clothes back on long enough to pay the delivery kid.

“It can wait,” Matt said, following him into the bedroom. Peter took his outstretched hand but jumped like a live wire when Matt touched him.

“Adrenaline hasn’t quite worn off.”

“I know,” Matt said, drawing him close to kiss him and press his pelvis against Peter’s. He was hungrier for Peter than he could ever remember being before, even though his own desensitized dick was barely responding to him. But his desire was so loud that it was almost beside the point--he just wanted anything he could get his hands or mouth on to relieve some of his need. Between kisses he worked off his own shirt and then Peter’s, and they shucked their jeans and their underwear and Matt knelt and took Peter into his mouth, easily rousing him with his tongue, but Peter pushed his head away almost immediately.

"What's wrong?"

“I’m sorry, babe,” Peter said, backing up a step. “I want to, but I can't--I still have too much of the mission in my head right now, I think.”

“It’s okay,” Matt said. This had happened before, too. “Let’s just lie down together.” Perhaps the feel of the familiar bed and the scent of the familiar sheets would do what Matt could not.

They curled up in the bed facing each other, Matt tracing the lines of Peter’s muscles while Peter simply lay with clenched fists, still vibrating with tension.

“What can I do?” Matt asked.

“Last night was bad,” Peter said. “I can't stop replaying it over and over again in my mind.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Peter said. “Maybe. I don’t know. Not yet.”

“That’s okay,” Matt said, stroking Peter’s hair. “We can just be home together for a while.”

Peter nodded.

Matt kissed him on the forehead and went into the bathroom to run a hot bath, dressing as the tub filled. He shook a good handful of lavender-mint Epsom salt into the water and cleared out the stale towels and added them to the laundry basket on his way back to the bed.

He knelt on the bed and reached forward, finding Peter’s shoulder. He had not moved. “Come with me,” Matt said softly. Peter obeyed and let Matt walk him into the bathroom and help him into the tub, gasping and then sighing as he sank into the hot water.

“Are you hurt?” Matt asked, wishing he’d thought to ask earlier.

“Just beat up pretty good,” Peter said. “Maybe a little more than usual.”

“This will help.”

“You take good care of me, babe,” Peter said, squeezing Matt’s hand as he slipped further into the water. “Thank you.”

While Peter soaked, Matt changed the sheets and started laundry and ran the dust mop over the floors, using the work to refamiliarize himself with the apartment. But of course, everything was more or less where it had been for 15 years, plus or minus the TV and treadmill Peter had brought with him.

He paused when he reached the large alcove under the stairs to the roof where Matt had mounted a heavy bag and speed bag side by side. He took a few swipes on the speed bag before throwing a very light test punch at the heavy bag. That went well, so he threw another, harder. He’d have to be extra disciplined about maintaining the right distance from the bag now so he didn’t accidentally break his wrist. Perhaps he could hang a little bell from it so he could hear where it swung, he thought, and train by ear until he got better. If he got better.

“You’ll be back at it in no time,” Peter said, startling Matt. He hadn’t heard him get out of the tub.

“Maybe.” Matt placed the flat of his hand against the heavy bag to stop it swaying. “I hope Claire can do something because this isn’t getting better on its own,” he said, aloud for the first time.

“Not even a little?”

“Nope.”

“Claire graduated summa cum laude from Wakanda Medical University,” Peter said. “If anyone in this town can help you, it’s her. And if she can’t, we’ll go to Wakanda ourselves.”

“Okay.” Matt gave a tight smile and then threw one more punch at the bag.

“Hey,” Peter stepped forward and pressed Matt’s cane into his hands. “I need to remember that the world is good. Let’s go for a walk.”

* * *

It was different being outside now. The world felt enormous and disorienting as he struggled to locate all the cars, buildings, street carts, lampposts, trash cans, people, dogs, squirrels, pigeons, litter, sidewalk cracks that he knew was there but could no longer perceive clearly, if at all. Tenth Avenue was never not busy, and the traffic felt so close that it took all of Matt’s strength not to flinch whenever a car rushed by.

He didn’t realize that he was progressively tightening his grip on Peter’s arm until he covered Matt’s hand with his and murmured, “It’s okay, babe. I got you.”

“I don’t like being this close to the street,” Matt said, his fear as frightening as the traffic itself. He could not remember the last time he had felt this vulnerable.

“I have a better idea, then,” Pete said. He hailed a cab to carry them a mile north to the entrance to Riverside Park, where they could walk for miles without encountering a single car.

They made their way down to the cobblestone path that ran along the river where Pete put in five miles every morning and headed north. Even now Matt could tell it was cooler by the water, almost pleasant, although New York never really was in the middle of August.

He felt safer here, enough to let himself relax enough to task some of his attention to the world around him as they walked. Bikes occasionally whizzed by on the left, along with the rare gonzo jogger foolish enough to run in this heat, mothers and nannies and small children in small, frustrated clusters on the benches to their right.

Further to the right and up the riverbank was the low hum of traffic along the West Side Highway, punctuated by the occasional horn or siren, the grumble of a diesel oil truck, or the mechanical aria of a semi’s brakes. Further out to the left and behind them, where the ship terminals lay, the deep bass chug of a large boat—a Circle Line tour boat, or possibly a Coast Guard patrol.

And then, rather suddenly, an explosion of barks and scuffles. Matt froze.

“What’s wrong?”

“Are those dogs loose?”

“Of course. It’s the dog park.”

“Already?”

“Um, yeah,” Peter said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Which, to him, it was. “Where did you think we were?”

“I have no idea where I am, Pete,” Matt said, more harshly than he intended. Or maybe not. The dogs had scared him more than he expected. “I know the river’s on my left and the city’s on my right. That’s it. I don’t know how far we’ve walked. I can only hear the dogs, not the fence.”

“Well, now you know we’re at the dog park, which means we’re at 86th, which you already know,” Peter said patiently.

But Matt wasn’t ready to stop being angry about it. “You can’t just assume I know this stuff right now.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, you weren’t.”

Peter bumped his shoulder against Matt’s. “We’re close to Luna’s. Let’s get some lunch. I’ll get us a cab if you don’t want to be on the street.”

“I’m not hungry,” Matt said.

“Well, I’m starving,” Peter said. “So do you mind sitting with me while I eat, at least?”

Matt bit his lip. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

* * *

After a lunch of more tacos than they could count and two beers apiece, they were both feeling much better—aside from their three bites of breakfast that morning neither of them had eaten since before the raid—and the beer had given Matt just enough liquid courage to suggest they walk home through the city instead of calling a cab.

Peter narrated the street as they walked, describing interesting people or unusual stores, occasionally noting the number of the street they were crossing or a landmark they were approaching, all with a cinematic level of detail that made Matt wonder how much of it was true, and how much he'd embellished just to make him smile. But he didn't much care. It was nice to smile again. 

“What’s funny?” Peter asked.

“Nothing,” Matt said. “I always like seeing the world through your eyes. The whole city is one big photograph for you.”

“Sometimes when you frame up a scene into a photo, it makes you feel like you’ve imposed a little order on the world, you know?”

“It’s been a pretty fucking disorderly summer,” Matt said.

“We need to take a couple weeks off,” Pete said. “We just need to _be_ for a while.”

“Well, I don’t have a choice right now, but it would probably do you some good, too.”

“I mean work, too.”

“I can’t go back to work like this,” Matt said.

“Sure, you could,” Pete said. “You didn’t lose your law degree.”

“Well, no, but--”

“But you’re not ready. And that’s okay,” Pete said. “God knows the last thing I want to do is wake up tomorrow to take a portrait of some corporate asshole for the cover of Forbes. I’d probably end up throwing the camera at him.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” Matt said mildly. 

They stopped at a liquor store to buy a better-than-usual scotch and then at the supermarket a block from home to restock the fridge and pick up a pair of thick steaks to grill.

It was after three by the time they got home. Matt was surprised how much the shared domestic business of putting away groceries managed to soothe his anxious heart. Everything was different, but at least this was the same. He still had his family.

After they were done they stood awkwardly in the kitchen. “I think there’s a game starting soon if you want to watch,” Matt offered.

“No,” Peter said, taking his hand. “Come to bed with me.”

“Feeling better?”

“No,” Peter said, but he kissed the back of Matt’s hand and pulled him toward the bedroom. They fucked quickly and urgently, Peter scarcely noticing or caring that Matt had to switch to his hand because he couldn't stay hard enough, so busy were they touching, kissing, licking almost every part of each other’s bodies, as if this communion was the final key unlocking the door to home.

When it was over, Matt kissed Peter’s face and found tears. “No matter what happened last night, I love you,” he said.

Peter said nothing. Instead he spooned up against Matt and drew Matt’s arm around him, holding his hand close to his chest, and slept.

* * *

Much later that night, sitting at the picnic table they’d installed on the roof, after they’d finished their steaks, after nearly half the bottle of scotch they’d bought that afternoon, Peter began to tell Matt about the mission.

The place had oozed hate, from the gun-range targets covered in posters of superheroes to the grim slogans painted on the walls proclaiming “Superhumans = Nonhumans” and “God Hates Mutants” interspersed with Hydra symbols and Confederate flags. 

They knew Hominus’ army wasn’t going to let itself fall into the hands of the powered devils. But he was shocked nonetheless when the sweet half-second of revenge he felt when he captured Hominus turned into horror as the terrorist managed to wrestle one arm free from Peter’s grasp long enough to shoot himself in the head. 

The shot served as some kind of signal to the rest of the men, because in a matter of seconds nearly 100 men had committed suicide in front of him and the other Avengers, turning the compound’s courtyard into a horrific nightmare of dead and dying bodies with exploded heads and faces, some still twitching or moaning or shitting themselves in death.

Matt crossed himself and searched out Peter’s hand. 

“I couldn’t stop them,” Peter said wonderingly. “It was over so fast—none of us even knew what was happening until it was too late. We thought we did everything we could to avoid something like that and it still—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Matt said, squeezing his hand tightly. “They were determined to die.”

“I found chunks of his head stuck to my suit afterward,” Peter said. “Hominus. Brains and blood and hair all up and down my arm and across my chest. On my mask.” He cleared his throat. “And you know what? I was glad he did it. I’ve never taken pleasure in another person’s death before, but I did that night. My only regret is that we couldn’t save the others.”

Matt tried to pull Peter close, but Peter stiffened and then pushed his arm away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want that right now. I can’t—"

“It’s okay,” Matt said. “Tell me what I can do.”

“You can hand me the scotch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's about to get real dark in here for a while. I promise there's a light at the end of the tunnel, though.


	10. Independence Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt receives bad news, and makes a big decision. Please be aware that there's some suicide talk here, if you're sensitive to that sort of thing. You can bail once we get up to the roof and pick up in the next chapter without missing too much, I think.

It would be more than a week after Hominus’ death before SHIELD allowed Claire to reopen her clinic in Stark Tower and put Matt through the diagnostic tests she needed to do to figure out what was going on with him.

In the meantime, Matt and Peter rattled around their apartment like a newly retired workaholics unused to spending more than 2 hours a day together, much less 24. They ran out of things to say to each other by the third day, but not out of things to snipe about—Peter’s nightmares kept them both awake most nights, leaving them both increasingly short-tempered and impatient with each other. They had not had sex since their first night home, which didn’t help either.

Peter forgot to pick up toilet paper, Matt kept the apartment too cold, Matt blamed Peter for misplacing anything he couldn’t find and drove Peter crazy by whaling away on the heavy bag while Peter was trying to read. Matt had never minded that Peter’s Avengers salary was three times his because he’d always been able to meet his expenses even when business was slow, but for the first time in the three years they’d lived together, Matt had to ask Peter to cover the rent on his office and Karen’s salary for another month. He wanted to go back to church and have a long talk with Father Joe, but he was still not ready to go anywhere alone and didn’t want to ask Peter, or anyone else, to help him.

Peter’s daily runs began to grow longer and longer; whether he just needed the time alone or was still trying to sweat out the ghosts of the raid, Matt didn’t know. But he appreciated the break because Peter had become exhausting.

Peter was still trying to find ways to set the world in order, whether it was repairing his latest antique Leica, deep cleaning the apartment or, disastrously, reorganizing the kitchen and inadvertently sparking a mini-meltdown in Matt when he could no longer find the coffee mugs.

When Peter wasn’t trying to fix the world, he was trying to fix Matt. He forced Matt into pointless games of catch and useless attempts at sparring with the billy clubs in the living room, as if that would make whatever was broken in Matt click back into place. Matt went along with it because nothing else seemed to be working, but there was so much anxiety pouring off Peter that it was contagious, making every setback feel like a catastrophic failure and ruining the rest of both their days.

Matt had never imagined feeling this alone with Peter, and he suspected Peter felt the same way. But they were both too lost in their private hells to take care of each other.

* * *

The night before his appointment with Claire, Matt couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, his brain would begin looping a reel of increasingly improbable worries and what-ifs about his future that he recognized as insane, but which nevertheless felt very, very real.

It didn’t take long for his tossing and turning to wake Peter.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Just thinking about tomorrow, I guess.”

“Excited?”

“Worried,” Matt said. “What if Claire can’t fix this?”

“Shh,” Peter said. “She can. I know she can.”

“No, you don’t,” Matt said.

“Well then, Mr. Catastrophe, I guess you’ll just have to go back to being an Ivy League-trained lawyer with a passion for helping ordinary citizens confront forces designed to keep them down.” Peter kissed the back of his head. “You could do worse.”

“Easy for you to say,” Matt said. “How am I going to practice law if I can’t hear people’s heartbeats? I can’t read anyone’s body language or know if they’re avoiding eye contact. What if I make a mistake and an innocent person goes to jail? Or--what if I can’t manage a trial anymore? What if I get lost in the courthouse and a judge holds me in contempt for being late? How am I even going to get to the courthouse by myself? I’m going to have to take Karen with me and then we’ll have to close the office every time I’m in court because I’m too afraid to cross the fucking street by myself.”

 “You won’t always be,” Peter said softly. “Take a breath, Matt. I know you’re freaked out right now but we’ll figure it out. I promise we will.”

But Matt wasn’t listening anymore. “And meanwhile you’re still going to go off to save the city every night and I’ll just be waiting for you, wondering if you’re going to come home…”

“Matt—"

Matt shook his head. “What we do is dangerous. I won’t know when you’re in trouble, or be able to help you if you are. If you get killed—”

“Shhh,” Peter said. “I love you so much, Matty. I am not going anywhere, I promise.”

“I know you believe that right now, and I want to believe it too—”

“Matt, stop,” Peter said. “Nothing good is going to come from pulling that thread. If you start preparing to lose me now, then you’ve already left me.” He squeezed Matt tight. “Don’t leave me, okay? I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

* * *

Six hours later, sleepless and frazzled, they were at Claire’s clinic.

There were blood tests and nerve conduction tests and an MRI and a physical battery of balance, strength and coordination tests, all with Peter hovering anxiously on the margins. After more than two hours of this, she finally ushered Matt and Peter into her office.

“The good news is that you’re a healthy 43-year-old man in peak physical condition, although you’ve got a little bit of arthritis in your right shoulder and I still don’t like your blood pressure. But overall you’re in better shape than most men half your age.”

“My life’s been a little stressful lately,” Matt said. “Let’s get on to the bad news.”

“Right,” Claire said. “So first let me explain what we’ve learned so far from the analysis of the gas and the autopsies. It appears that the active compound triggers a kind of cascading autoimmune reaction in powered people against their mutations. In other words, it makes your body view the mutation as an infection. If the dose is too high, like it was for Jessica, Luke, Danny, and Trish, your immune system attacks your whole body, you go into shock and die. But at a lower dose, like you got, it does what it was designed to do: Destroy the mutation.”

“Hominus talked about a cure,” Peter said.

“It wasn’t until we saw Matt’s scan that we understood what he meant,” Claire said. “I know you didn’t want to be a guinea pig for this, Matt, but you’ve probably just made the most important contribution to mutant physiology to date.”

“Glad I’m still good for something,” Matt said wryly.

“So here’s what we’ve got,” Claire said, turning her computer monitor so Peter could see it and described it for Matt’s benefit. “Matt, I believe the mutation you experienced as a child caused an overdevelopment of your somatic nervous system. The chemical itself was too corrosive for the tissue it came in direct contact with, which is why it burned your face and eyes so badly, but because of those burns, you got just enough into your bloodstream to trigger the mutation, which Peter can see in the density of these cranial nerves here, here, and here,” she said.

“What are all the dark streaks?” Peter asked.

“Demyelination,” Claire said. “This is the part I don’t like. Myelin is like a telephone wire from one nerve to another—if it’s damaged or destroyed, it can’t transmit information anymore, and eventually the nerve just withers. It’s the same thing we see in multiple sclerosis. But Hominus wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted to make a cure, because you only have demyelination in the enhanced portions of your brain.”

“But the antidote will fix that, right?” Peter asked.

“No,” Matt said.

“Don’t mansplain the doctor, Matt.”

“He’s right,” Claire said. “The brain doesn’t regenerate. We believe there may be a short window after exposure when the antidote can prevent central nervous system damage, but it can’t reverse it.”  

“More importantly--is it going to get worse?” Matt asked.

“No,” Claire said. “Matt, I want to be clear that while you have a lot of deficits relative to where you were before, the word ‘relative’ is key here. Your remaining senses are still excellent—especially your hearing. There is absolutely nothing here preventing you from living a normal life.”

“ _Relatively_ normal, you mean,” Matt said. “You’re saying I should stick to my day job.”

But Peter wasn’t having it. “There’s got to be something else we can try. Can’t you like, turn his mutation back on or something? Or give him cybernetic implants?"

“It’s illegal,” Matt said flatly. “It violates the Sokovia Accords’ supersoldier ban.”

“There are doctors who don’t care about that.”

“I do,” Claire said quickly. “There’s a very good reason the only people who have ever actually done this on purpose are the bad guys. The safety record on these kinds of interventions is abysmal. Even if you survived, there’s no guarantee you’d be the same man you were before. I’m not even sure I’d risk it to save your life.”

“But Steve Rogers—"

Matt placed his hand on Pete’s shoulder. “Jesus, Pete. Stop already.”

“No, Matt. No. This can’t be all she can do,” Peter argued. “I refuse to believe this. With everything science can do now, you’re honestly telling us there’s no hope?”

“I’d never tell anyone to live without hope,” Claire said gently. “A year or five from now, who knows? Maybe the laws will change and the science will advance. But don’t forget to live in the meantime, you know?”

“But—"

“Pete, baby,” Matt said, sliding his hand around Peter’s shoulders and drawing him close. “It’s okay. Just—please stop.”

“Matt—”

“Shh,” Matt said, stroking Peter’s hair away from his face. “I’ll be all right. I promise. I’ll be all right.”

How easy the lie came.

Pete shook his head, then nodded. “Okay,” he said, not believing it for a minute. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

* * *

The air was heavy and threatening a storm when they left Stark Tower, and the sidewalks were thick with Lincoln Center’s lunchtime crowds, but Matt insisted they walk the 15 blocks home. He needed to face New York at full bore, buffeted by the flood of office workers and tourists and construction workers waiting on line at the halal food carts that lined Broadway this time of day and bike messengers and the thunderous hum and honk of midday traffic and the groan and beep of stopping buses and the rumble and screech of the subway below them, the scent of shawarma and exhaust and sweat and smog heavy in the rain-laden air.

He supposed it would get less confusing as he learned to make better sense of it, but how much less? All he could think about was how much easier it had been before.

Two blocks later they heard the first crash of thunder and barely made it to the next corner before the rain began to fall. They took cover at a diner crushed with tourists inside, but Peter spotted one dry table under the awning outside, and so they sat there to wait out the storm away from the crowd, wordlessly holding hands across the table and picking at hamburgers they did not feel like eating.

Beyond the awning, the rain became a kind of natural sonar, throwing the city into sharper resolution than Matt had known in weeks. Cars, trees, buildings, awnings, street cart umbrellas—he could hear the contours of them all by the variable patter and rush and thump of the raindrops against each surface. Matt’s heart was light with relief—finally, for a little while at least, he had a bit of his old life back. Maybe this new version of his life wouldn’t be as bad as he thought.

But as the rain began to let up, and the word began to fade away again, Matt’s dread began to creep back. He was Orpheus giving into temptation for a glance at Eurydice, then feeling his heart shatter as she slipped away forever.

 _Attachments make you weak,_ Stick always said. He could not afford to need the rain this much, he knew, or he’d never survive the sunny days ahead.

* * *

Later that night, they lay awake in each other’s arms, unwilling to let sleep come just yet. They had tried to make love, but Matt still couldn't stay hard enough to fuck, and the consolation blow job he'd given Peter after that failure only seemed to make things worse. All he wanted now was to find some way to be close to him again. 

Matt rested his hand against Peter’s cheek, feeling the subtle twitch in his temple of his eye blinking. Peter smiled against Matt’s palm and Matt ran his thumb across his lips and located the dimple in Peter’s right cheek. “This is what I’m going to miss the most,” he said. “Knowing you’re smiling without having to touch you.”

“You can touch me anytime you want, Matt, you know that.”

Matt rested his fingertips against Peter’s lips. “Stop doing that.”

“What?”

“Trying to make it better.”

“Isn’t the entire point of being in a committed relationship making things better for each other?”

“Not by pretending things aren’t broken in the first place.” Matt kissed his forehead.

“I just don’t understand why you’re giving up so soon.”

“I’m not giving up,” Matt said. “I don’t want to be a science experiment. I don’t want to risk my life on the off-chance that I could be more than a man again someday. Or even a whole one, at this point,” he said bitterly, idly lifting his dick and letting it fall back against his thigh. “I’m willing to live with this decision. But I understand if you don’t want to.”

“What are you talking about?” Peter said, rolling onto his side and snaking his arm across Matt's chest. 

"You deserve someone who can stay hard enough to fuck you properly, for one thing," Matt said bitterly. "Someone you can give pleasure to in return."

"Oh Matt. That is a challenge, not a dealbreaker." He nuzzled against Matt's temple. "Besides, I think you're still just getting used to the way your senses work now. I'm not going to cry over a few false starts--or even a lot of false starts. And if it means we have to do things differently forever, then that's what we do. We will find something that works, okay?" He kissed Matt's cheek. "Besides, you're so much more to me than that."

"Am I, though? Now? Look at me, Pete. There's so much I can't do anymore."

"Yes," Peter said, pulling him tight. “I didn’t fall in love with you because you were Daredevil and I didn’t fall in love with you because your powers made your blindness more convenient for me. Do you really believe that?”

“I don’t know what to think anymore. The way you were talking at Claire’s—"

“That wasn’t for me, babe—I just wanted to find a way to give you back a part of your life that’s important to _you_ ,” Peter said. “Me? I fell for you long before I knew what you could or couldn’t do. It was the night of the magazine party, at the bar. I told a dumb joke and you gave this slow smile that finally broke into a laugh, and I was a goner, Matt. This Ivy League attorney who was a thousand times smarter than I would ever be and wanted to save the world with the law, and I made you laugh,” Peter said. “That laugh erased my fucking brain. All I knew after that was that I wanted to spend my life hearing that laugh. As long as I can still do that, I don’t care about anything else.”

Matt turned onto his side away from Peter. “I haven’t felt much like laughing lately, I guess.”

“Me neither,” Peter said, spooning up behind him. “But we will again one day. I know it.”

Matt didn’t answer. Peter tucked his forehead against Matt’s shoulder, and eventually fell asleep.

* * *

But sleep again would not come for Matt. He was so sad it was impossible to remain still.

He slid carefully out from under Peter’s arm and went to the bathroom for a drink of water, but instead of returning to bed, he went up to the roof. He found his way to the picnic table and sat on the bench, facing the midnight city as it wound down a Tuesday night. He instinctively tried to reach out with his senses, but all he could hear was the undifferentiated whoosh of traffic along the West Side Highway, punctuated by the occasional emergency siren or the squeal of truck brakes, and, every once in a while, a boisterous voice emerging from one of the bars below. All he could smell was the tar paper and asphalt lining the roof, and the faint scent of the sea carried up through the Hudson at high tide.

He stood and cautiously walked toward the two-foot-high retaining wall that marked the edge of the building. But he was overcome with vertigo as he imagined getting closer to the edge, imagining one wrong step, tripping over the wall and plummeting to his death. He got down on all fours, the tar paper biting into his palms and knees, and crawled forward, feeling for the wall and rocking back into a seated position when he located it. Then he cautiously eased himself up to sit on the wall to listen to the city conclude the day’s business.

Suddenly he was weeping. There were people out there who needed help right now, maybe nearby—so many more, now that Jess, Luke, Danny, and Trish were gone—and he had no way of knowing, or helping even if he did know.

His heart cracked with helplessness. What use was he, anymore? To have to wait until someone gathered the courage to seek his help, and the money to pay his fee? He could only afford to take on so many _pro bono_ clients, he knew that, and knowing that he would have to turn people away without having any other recourse to deliver them justice was awful.

He should have died that day. He knew it now, knew it as surely as he knew anything in the world. Justice came with conditions now, and an admission fee, and he wasn’t sure he could live with that. It was all just so fucking unfair.

The stairwell door opened with a creak. “I thought you might be up here,” Peter said. “What’re you doing?”

“Just thinking.”

“That close to the edge?”

“I know exactly how high up I am. The top of the next building is two stories down.”

“Yes, but there’s an alley six stories down you have to clear first,” Peter said evenly.

 “I’m not going anywhere,” Matt said. “Just trying to remember what it feels like.”

“I’d feel better about this walk down memory lane if you weren’t so close to the edge,” Peter said gently.

“I’m just fine where I am.”

Suddenly Peter’s hand was on Matt’s arm, strong and unyielding. He pulled Matt away and into his arms, but Matt wrestled him off and scooted a few feet away.

“What the fuck?” he demanded. “You can’t just—sneak up on me like that.”

“I’ve seen more death in the past two weeks than any man should see in a dozen lifetimes. I’m not letting you add yourself to that list.” Peter crawled to where Matt was sitting and gathered him back into his arms, this time holding him so tight Matt knew he could not break free without hurting him. “Talk to me.”

But they just sat there, Matt’s back against Peter’s chest, their hearts beating steadily against one another.

Finally, Matt spoke. “Did the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen really make the world a better place? Even with all the battles and the destruction—was he a net good for the city?”

“Without a doubt,” Peter said, kissing him. “I’ll never not be proud of what you did.”

“What he did.”

“What’s the difference?”

Matt was quiet for a long time.

“Babe? I think I really need you to answer that question.”

He shifted out of Peter’s embrace and turned to face him. “I’ve come to realize something important since I got knocked out of the game,” he said. “Daredevil wasn’t Matt Murdock’s disguise. It was the other way around. And now Daredevil’s dead and I'm the empty shell he’s left behind.”

“Bullshit,” Pete said. “You think I don’t know who you are by now? You’re the kid who always believed Jack Murdock could win a fight, and probably the only lawyer in the city who made his paralegal a full partner in his business because he knew how important she was to the work you do. You’re the first lawyer Brett Mahoney calls when a vulnerable perp gets booked, and the guy who Foggy asked to stand up with him at his wedding even though you hadn’t seen each other in more than a year. That’s who you are, Matt. Daredevil? He was just a weapon, nothing more.” Peter took Matt’s hands in his. “So tell me what you really want. No more excuses or lies, okay?”

“I don’t know how to be like this,” Matt said. “I don’t know how to be—not him. I don’t know how to be less than him.”

“You’re not less than anyone, Matt.”

“I think—” Matt began. _God, give me the strength to do this._ “I think I need to be on my own for a while. I need to figure out who I am now. Apart from Daredevil. Apart from you. I need to know that I can be okay by myself.”

“No. You’ve had a shitty day. Let’s not make any big decisions right now, okay?”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life, Pete. Just please trust that I need this.”

“Why?”

Matt shrugged. “I don’t know. Pride, I guess.”

“You really believe this, don’t you,” Peter said, a kind of disbelieving wonder in his voice. “It’s two in the morning. Can it wait till sunrise at least?”

It couldn’t. “I’ve made my decision.”

“Fine,” Peter said, humoring him. “How long did you have in mind? A week? A month? How long should I pack for?”

“Three,” Matt said, the number suddenly crystallizing in his mind. “Three months. Ninety days.”

“Oh, Matt. What are you doing?”

“Please don’t argue with me. Just trust that I need this.”

“All right,” Peter said, standing up. “I get that you want to reclaim some control over your life, but you’re about to drive it into a ditch, Matt. I love you, but you’re a fucking idiot.” He reached down and took Matt’s hand. “Here. Let me at least get you downstairs.”

“No,” Matt said. “I’m going to stay up here for a while.”

“Just promise me I’m not going to find you splattered in the alley on my way out the door,” Peter said, not at all joking.

“I promise.”

When he came downstairs an hour later, Peter was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, y'all, go make a cup of tea and hug someone you love. The next couple of chapters are going to be pretty dark, too.
> 
> If you want to see what Peter gets up to after he leaves the apartment, check out [The River Between Us](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16145177/chapters/37723184) next.


	11. Everyone Is Extremely Fucking Sorry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt makes plans. God laughs. Maria Hill calls with an unusual question.

The next morning, Matt awoke with a curious hysterical lightness that he couldn’t place. The simple morning routine of showering, shaving—he was getting better at that now—brushing his teeth, making coffee and toast, listening to the news on NPR, it all took on the same kind of monumental quality he’d felt when he first moved into the apartment 15 years ago, his first time ever living alone. It hadn’t quite sunk in that he’d kicked Peter out—all he felt that morning was anticipation, and anxiety, but also a strange sense of relief that the penny had finally dropped, and he was finally facing the reckoning his mutation had allowed him to escape when he was nine.

As he ate and dressed, a plan formed in his mind. Today he would walk around the block by himself and see how it felt. No pressure—he knew this neighborhood like the back of his hand, after all—and he wouldn’t force himself to go further. Just take the win and go home before anything shook his confidence. Then tomorrow he’d practice crossing the street at 50th. He’d do that a few times before he attempted to cross 10th Avenue, with its five lanes and buses and bike messengers to boot. By Saturday, he’d try to reach St. Michael’s, three blocks away, for a long overdue visit with Father Lantom. Then maybe on Sunday he’d practice the five blocks to his office so he could pick up some case files, and then get back to work by Wednesday or Thursday.

That plan fell apart almost as soon as he stepped outside. The sidewalk was busy with morning rush hour, it was trash day and there were cans and bags all over the sidewalk, and to make everything worse, even the garbage truck happened to be making its way down the street at about the same pace as his, deafening him on his left and flooding his nose with the scent of garbage and diesel and leaving him so disoriented that he froze, unable to decide whether to wait it out or just power through. But he realized he was in a bad place to stop—people were bumping into him as they tried to get around, and the truck was so loud and the garbage stank so badly that he turned around in a panic and hurried back home as quickly as he dared.

By the time he burst through the door into the vestibule he could barely breathe. He leaned against the mailboxes, sweating and pulling at the collar of his t-shirt, though it was not tight, until his heart no longer felt like it would explode.

He punched the mailboxes, barking his knuckles against the locks, feeling the blood pool in the little divots between them.

“Fuck,” he said. He punched the wall with his other hand. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.”

Once he got back upstairs, after he cleaned off his hand and stopped the bleeding, decided he would give himself one hour to regroup, and then go back out. There was a schedule to keep, after all. But one hour turned into two, which turned into an afternoon Mets game to listen to, and when he realized when it ended that it was now rush hour again and the sidewalk would be ten times as busy as it had been this morning and that he was better off waiting until tomorrow.

A fitful night’s sleep did little to quell his anxiety, however, and the next morning he tried to burn some of it off on the heavy bag before he went out. He punched until his sore knuckles threatened to bleed again, then threw in a few cautious roundhouses and was pleased to discover that he’d retained enough muscle memory to strike the bag in the right place even though he no longer knew exactly where the bag was.

His good luck followed him outside. No truck, no trash cans, and even the sidewalk seemed less busy—though perhaps without the trash crowding the curbs people just had more room. He reveled in the early September sun, already burning hot on his neck and nose—he’d missed that while cooped up at Frank’s all summer. There were eleven stoops between his building and 9th Avenue, and this time he counted each one off as his cane struck it. And indeed, as soon as he reached eleven, he felt the crossbreeze that told him he’d reached the avenue.  

It occurred to him that he should maybe just turn around now, while he was ahead. Imprint a pattern of success so you don’t get discouraged too soon and all that. It was how he had first been taught as a boy. But he was not a child anymore, and he was anxious to replace the memory of yesterday’s debacle. Besides, he knew the streets of Hell’s Kitchen as well as anyone. All he had to do was relearn how to read them.

He turned right and headed south along 9th Avenue. The street was louder here, with more traffic, but he had long ago memorized each business lining the sidewalk and he named them to himself as he walked in order to keep track. Tico’s Ferreteria, Smoky’s Grill, the Chase bank, Ray’s Pizza, the grimy liquor store with a sign above it that just read “Liquor Store,” and finally the CVS on the corner.

Now he picked up a bit more speed. There were only eight stoops along this block, plus a small parking lot in the middle that was gated off. The gate caught him by surprise—he must have missed a stoop—but he didn’t panic because he still knew where he was and the next thing he knew he could feel the crosswind that marked 10th Avenue. His heart began to lighten—one more block—about 300 feet, if he remembered correctly—and he’d be home.

But 10th Avenue was not in a cooperative mood that morning. As he rounded the corner he almost immediately walked into a scrum of oblivious Midwestern tourists piling out of what sounded like an idling tour bus outside the new Hilton that had gone up on this corner last year and he managed to whack one on the leg with his cane and step on another’s foot before he could work his way out of the crowd. Then three steps later he found himself in a traffic jam of loaded luggage carts, and he almost panicked when someone grabbed his arm out of nowhere and tried to pull him to the side.

“Let me help you sir,” said the person—gruff, New York accent, strong arm clothed in thick polyester, probably one of the bellhops. Startled, Matt stepped back and tried to pull away from him, raising his arm to throw a punch and catching himself just before he could. People had been doing this to him ever since he lost his sight but this was the first time it had ever taken him by surprise.

“Jesus, just—don’t fucking touch me,” he said, finally managing to twist his arm out of the man’s grasp. “I can take care of myself, okay?”

“Look, man, there’s bags everywhere. You need to go around.”

“What do you think I was trying to do?” Matt said angrily. Then realizing he had gotten turned around during the altercation, he pointed ahead and asked, “Is 50th that way?”

“Other way,” the man said. “You sure you don’t need help?”

“Go to hell,” Matt said, loud enough that some of the tourists nearby fell quiet.

Angry and frightened and embarrassed, he straightened himself up and stormed home as quickly as he dared, his cane smacking the sidewalk angrily, wanting nothing more than to get away from all the eyes he was sure were staring at him. This time instead of punching the wall, he sprinted to the bathroom as soon as he got upstairs and vomited as the last of his adrenaline wore off, leaving him shaky and anxious.

 _It was still a better day than yesterday_ , he told himself, and was surprised to realize that it was true.

* * *

 He followed his plan, if more slowly than he’d hoped, crossing streets at different times of day, then working on the much busier avenues, eventually building the courage to cross without asking anyone if the way was clear, trusting the chirp of the Walk signs and the rush of the traffic.

He missed Peter in a weird, distant way—not so much the sex as the physical contact, hearing him move around the apartment, the life they would have had if this had not happened to him. But mostly he found himself missing his dad.

His father had adapted to Matt’s blindness with a gruff matter-of-factness—life had always been hard for Jack Murdock, and once Matt got home from rehab his philosophy was mostly to let Matt figure things out on his own. He’d stood calmly by as Matt stumbled and bumped into things and cut and scraped and bruised himself until he learned his way around their apartment again, then around the rest of the building and the alley and finally up the sidewalk to the corner store—his father following six feet behind the entire way.

Of course, Jack had also wept for months afterward when he thought Matt was out of earshot, never knowing Matt could hear him over the shower, in his bedroom at the other end of the apartment, out in the alley behind the trash cans: _It should have been me, it should have been me, it should have been me._ But when his son was near, he had only one mission: to make sure Matt could take care of himself.

One of his few concessions was to walk Matt the nine blocks to and from school every day, because that was a little too far even for Jack’s comfort. It had been years since Matt had held his dad’s hand, and though he didn’t need it—even then, he’d been able to use his powers well enough to know when it was safe to cross the street—he liked having the extra time with him, the gentle pressure of his father’s hand closed around his own. They talked more on these 15-minute walks than they ever did at home, sometimes discussing school, the books Matt was reading, or boxing strategy. But the best days were when Jack talked about his own life.

He told Matt all about growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in the ‘70s, back when New York was at its most rotten, and how his mother had signed him up for boxing as much to protect himself from the muggers and mobsters and addicts who roamed the neighborhood back then as to prevent him from becoming one himself. He’d regale Matt with stories of hijinks and scrapes and pranks that free-ranging New York kids could get up to in those days, of the strange mix of dock workers, working-class Irish and theater folk who lived there then, of the weirdoes and the colorful drunks and the small commune of whores from Minneapolis who often crashed in the abandoned building next door to his.

And once, on their way home on a cold Friday afternoon, he talked about Matt’s mom, which he never did. All he’d ever told Matt about her was that she had gotten sick not long after he was born, and that she had died.

He told Matt how they’d been assigned to the same short bank of lockers at the end of the hall their freshman year of high school and he’d known the moment he met her that he was going to marry him. Of course, she had no idea he existed until their senior year, at which point she’d long since moved lockers, but then “Rocky” came out and suddenly everyone wanted to talk to P.S. 111’s boxing champ—including Margaret Grace O’Riordan.

Matt had been conceived at their senior prom. _Always remember Stallone in your prayers, Matty. He’s the reason you exist._

He had never seen a photograph of her, but that day Jack finally described her to him, a dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty, with a scatter of freckles across her nose and a wit as sharp as her heart was soft. She couldn’t abide a bully and never feared standing up to one—she was the self-appointed protector of the picked-on and outcast, even when her brawls landed her in detention, as they often did.

 _I think that’s why we got along so well. She was a fighter, too._

_Can you still be a fighter if you’re blind?_

_You already are, Matty. You’re the toughest one I know._

For most of his adult life, Matt’s only prayer for his father was that he know that Matt was okay, that he’d turned out to be a fighter after all. Now he just wanted him back for just one more day, just one more walk around the neighborhood, just one more conversation with him.

_I need your help, Pop. I don’t know how to do this._

_Sure you do._ _We Murdocks may get knocked down a lot, but we always get back up, right, Matty?_

_I don't know if I can this time._

_Yeah, you can._

_I'm afraid of everything right now._

_I know. You gotta get up anyway. Even if you lose, you gotta lose on your feet, okay? Don't let 'em put you down for good._

* * *

It was more than a week before he made it to church, but he did, grateful that he had stopped taking Communion after sleeping with Pete and didn’t have to try to navigate that particular piece of choreography anymore. He didn’t suppose he’d ever take Communion again, he realized, because whether he’d lost Pete or not, he’d never repent of that relationship.

He waited in the pew while the rest of the parishioners filed out, but found himself still sitting for many minutes after he heard the last of the voices fade. Then, to his right, a rustle and the heavy sigh of an old man sitting down next to him.

“It’s good to see you again, Matthew,” the priest said. “After that incident in Brooklyn I was afraid you’d been killed.”

“Almost,” he said. “Can I speak freely?”

“It’s just us and the Big Guy,” Father Lantom said, half of a question in his voice.

“The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen did die in that explosion,” he said. “It stole my powers. I’m all that’s left.”

“I see.” The priest placed a hand on his shoulder. He had become so very frail, Matt realized, it had almost no weight at all. “I’m sorry, Matthew.”

“Me too. Everyone is extremely fucking sorry.”

“It’s reasonable to be angry.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s reasonable to be scared and frustrated and sad and grieving. I’ve done this before. It still sucks.”

“One loss rarely makes the next one easier,” Father Lantom said.

“Thanks for the validation.”

“And how is Peter coping?”

“I don't know. I kicked him out two weeks ago because I needed to prove to myself that I could live without him. So.”

“Live without Peter or without Daredevil?”

“Both.”

“I see.”

“You know what the kicker is? Peter got into a scary situation at work a few weeks ago. He’s fine, obviously—but it was several hours before I had any news and it was the first time I wasn’t able to help him and I foolishly made a deal with God that I would give Him anything He wanted as long as He let Peter come home.” Matt laughed bitterly. “God took His cut and I kicked him out anyway.”

“God doesn’t make those deals, Matthew. You may have offered, but He did not accept.”

“Maybe it was the Devil then.”

They sat quietly for a few moments before the priest spoke again. “One of the things they never tell you about getting old is how little sleep you need. Every night, one, two in the morning, I’m still up, wandering around the priory like a ghost. I’ll try to sit and read or study or pray, but all I seem to want to do lately is be outside. Even when the weather’s bad—I don’t know why. If my knees are up to it, I’ll take a turn around the block, and if they’re not, I’ll just go sit in the churchyard. I don’t know if you can remember or not, but you really can’t see too many stars in the city anymore--but you can see the moon, and sometimes I’ll just sit and watch it for half an hour or more. And the other night, I found myself wondering the strangest thing.”

“What?”

“How do astronauts come back to Earth?”

“I assume you’re not asking how the space shuttle works.”

“Think about it—you’re one of only, what, 50 men and women who have ever walked the Earth to view it from space. How does anyone go home after that? How can you ever go to the grocery store again, or mow the lawn, or do your taxes after that? How do you find any meaning in that?”

“You’d probably think differently if you had someone to come home to,” Matt said, suspecting as he spoke that he had arrived at Father Lantom’s point.

But he hadn’t. “Astronauts aren’t required to be married, Matthew. They don’t have to have children or living parents or siblings,” he said. “And even those who do—they’ve experienced something their families will never, ever understand.”

“At the end of the day it’s just a job, though, right? One with an amazing view, but a job nonetheless. A mission is not the same thing as a life.”

“No, it’s not,” Father Lantom agreed. 

_Ah._

“I didn’t think it would end this soon.”

“I’m just glad it didn’t end with you in a grave, Matthew.”

“I always figured it would.”

“Why?”

Matt shrugged and finally worked his way up to the question he needed to ask. “Am I being punished for loving Peter?” he asked. “Do you think God decided I was no longer worthy of His gift?”

“God made you as you are, Matty, and He loves you as you are.”

Matt gave a tight smile and nodded. “So what am I supposed to do now?”

“Well, the Book of Job can be helpful, although I find it a little melodramatic, to be honest. Persevere with faith long enough and eventually your life will be richer than before, and so on and so forth,” the priest said. “So let’s try this: Tell me again how you met Peter.”

“You know how we met.”

“Humor me. He was taking your picture for an award, right? 25 New Yorkers making a difference, something like that?”

“Yeah. But I was only there because I got Kingpin convicted with evidence I collected as Daredevil.”

“True, but how did the other 24 people do it?”

Matt sighed. “Point taken.”

“You still have a lot to offer the world if you choose to, Matthew.”

* * *

He spent the next two weeks exploring further afield in his neighborhood, taking the bus for a few blocks to get used to it and easing his way back into familiar stops. He began spending an hour or two most weekday afternoons at the little café on 52nd where he and Pete used to have breakfast on Sundays before Matt went to church and Pete went for his weekly 15-mile run. Mostly he’d read one of the dozens of books on his shelf that he’d never had time to read before, trying to retrain his desensitized fingertips to recognize Braille, or sometimes he’d bring his laptop and catch up on his law journals.

He and Peter did not speak, but sometimes he stalked him online, scrolling through Peter’s Instagram account and reading the captions, trying to glean some clue as to what he was doing, and how he was doing. Peter knew he did this and would sometimes include a private joke or message among his hashtags. But his posts were opaque now—mostly bland and work-related, though there was a photo of Aunt May on her birthday (according to the caption) that included what Matt decided was a passive-aggressive #alwaysthereforme.

Well, Peter was entitled to be angry at him—kicking him out had been a dick move. And Matt’s only social media presence, by contrast, was his professional one, which Karen mostly managed—which, since he hadn’t reopened the office yet, left Peter even more in the dark about Matt’s life than Matt was about his.

He felt no guilt about any of this. Talking with Father Lantom, he’d come to realize how jealous and resentful he was of Pete for not losing his powers or his place as an Avenger, and how much it hurt to think of him suiting up every night as he always had, swinging from roof to roof and saving people from the hundreds of crimes and emergencies that could change the course of an entire life.

While Matt still hadn’t mustered the courage to take the subway, with its noise and crowds, by himself.

He channeled his feelings of uselessness by keeping in shape as best he could, skipping rope and beating the hell out of the heavy bag at home for hours every day, but even with all that, he could tell he was starting to lose the edge he’d honed every night for more than 20 years. Granted, he knew that he was still in excellent shape by any definition, but he could tell he wasn’t quite as fast as he’d been, didn’t hit quite as hard as he used to.  

He certainly wasn’t as graceful. He thought he had learned how to cope during his seven weeks with Frank and Karen, but he realized now all he had managed to do was learn his way around the loft really well. Every day brought a new assault on his dignity—a knocked-over glass, a broken plate, a new scrape from a low-hanging No Parking sign or the corner of a table. He tripped over thresholds and missed stairs and bumped into people on the street and walked into closing doors and once spent an eternal ten minutes searching for the keys he dropped while taking out the trash, which turned out to be just three feet away from where he stood.

These were things that would get better with practice, he knew, but it didn’t piss him off any less when it happened, and the relentless accretion of all these tiny angers had shortened his temper considerably. This was especially true at home, when the betrayal of his sense of space seemed all the more acute. He found himself throwing jostled mugs, knocking over chairs whose only offense was to be two inches closer to him than he remembered, tearing down a curtain that had unexpectedly brushed his shoulder. One very bad night, he pulled down a bookcase after being unable to locate a book (that he later found on his nightstand), and the crash had brought his downstairs neighbor, Mr. DeRossa, rushing up to make sure he was all right.

He managed to persuade DeRossa that he didn’t need help cleaning it up, and maybe that was true, but he just left it where it lay, simply skirting it as best he could as he went to and from the kitchen.

When Karen came over the following Wednesday with a pizza for their weekly dinner, he didn’t lie about what happened, and she didn’t judge.

“We could clean it up tonight,” she said mildly, a suggestion cloaked within the observation.

“I’ll take care of it,” he assured her.

But he didn’t. Instead, it became a demented talisman of rebellion against the precisely ordered environment he knew he needed to maintain so he could live independently, and every time he had to dig through the scatter of books and splintered lumber for the next volume of his novel it felt like a gleeful victory over—what, he didn’t know, but it felt rooted in the same impulse he’d had as a kid to leave his bed unmade just because he could.

Eventually, it became normal.

* * *

One afternoon he received a call from a number he didn’t recognize. He debated not answering it for about three rings before recognizing that it had a SHIELD prefix.

“Matt, it’s Maria Hill. I have a very strange question for you.”

Matt’s heart sank. Of course Peter would have had to apprise SHIELD of his new address, however temporary, which meant their business was SHIELD’s business. Which, until this moment, he had not considered. Well, best get it over with then. “Ask away.”

“The mayor’s office is commissioning a memorial for the Defenders and wants to know whether Daredevil is really dead,” she said. “We never confirmed it, because we wanted to wait—" she paused to choose her words. “For your medical results. We put out ‘missing and presumed dead’ in an attempt to keep the heat off you while you recovered, but of course we hoped—"

“You want my permission to say yes,” Matt said. 

“It’s your legacy, Matt. I’ll tell them whatever you want me to tell them. If you want to keep your options open--"

“I have no more options,” Matt said. “Tell them I'm dead."

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Maria said after a long pause. 

“You and me both,” Matt said briskly. “Was there anything else you needed?"

“If there’s anything we can do—"

“We both know the law, Maria. There’s nothing you’re allowed to do.” 

“No.” 

“Anyway, if that’s all, I have a deposition to prepare for,” he said, pretending he was at the office, wearing a suit, pretending that he’d showered and shaved that day. Pretending that Maria was a dummy and that SHIELD had not been trailing his every move since Peter left.

“No, that’s all,” Maria said. “Just—we’re all thinking about you, Matt. Stay in touch, okay? And take care of yourself. Please."

Matt hung up without saying goodbye. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for hanging in so far, y'all. Grief is a messy thing. One note, for those of you who know Maggie Murdock's real fate -- in this universe, Matt hasn't discovered what really happened to her yet.


	12. Lost In The Wilderness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Misty stages an intervention. Matt makes a decision that could destroy everything.

He returned to Josie’s for the first time since before the summer on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of September. It was still hot outside, and Josie’s air conditioning was not remotely keeping up with the climate, but it felt good all the same to be back.

“Long time no see, Murdock,” Josie called as he came in.

“Likewise,” said Matt. A joke! He had managed a joke at last.

Which Josie pointedly ignored. “Plenty of seats at the bar for you.”

“I’m meeting someone,” he said.

“Over here, Matt,” Misty called from a table somewhere to his right, back beyond the pool table, he thought. He paused, expecting her to meet him and walk him over, but she didn’t.

 _So we’re playing this game now_ , he thought, and sighed. She was going to make him make a fool of himself. In front of Josie, who had no idea how much things had changed for him.

“Am I late?” he asked, though he knew he wasn’t. He just wanted to keep her talking so he could find her.

“Nope,” was all she said.

He slowly picked his way through the blessedly mostly-empty bar toward where he thought Misty’s voice had come from, around high tables and the pool table and past the dart boards until he got acceptably close enough to earn a “Took you long enough” from her, and a left-sided hug.

“No arm today?” he asked.

“It’s too hot and I’m off duty,” she said. “You want a beer? I got us a pitcher.”

“Sure, thanks,” he said.

“It’s a small table,” she said. “I’m sure you can find it by yourself.”

Matt shook his head and refused the seat she offered him. “Look, I know what you’re doing, and I appreciate that you want to help, but I’m really not in the mood for this right now.”

“The Earth keeps spinning whether or not you’re in the mood to deal with the day you’re given,” Misty said. “Sit down and pour yourself a beer.”

Matt cursed under his breath and obeyed.

“I’m not here to give you a pep talk, or tell you know I know exactly what you’re going through,” she said. “But we've had this thing in common for a long time and we've never really talked about it. So I thought maybe it was long past time we did.”

“What do you want to know, Misty?” Matt asked, not bothering to disguise his annoyance. “You want to hear how I held up a bus for almost five minutes trying to swipe a MetroCard upside down? Or how I almost got hit by an electric car that I didn’t hear while I was trying to cross 10th Avenue? Or maybe how I wiped out on the stairs coming out of church last week because I missed a step? Please, Misty, tell me what misery you want me to share.”

"I'm not here to be a ghoul," Misty said irritably. "But you can vent to me anytime, because I get it."

"You have no idea what this is like for me."

"Okay, fine. Leave," Misty said. "You know, you're only as alone in this as you want to be. But don't tell me I don't know what it’s like to wake up not being able to do everything I could before. I'm right-handed, Matt, and I don't have a right hand. And no robot arm is ever going to fix that. So, yeah, I don't know what it's like to be blind, but I do know what it's like when everything is twice as hard as it used to be.”

"When you fuck up, you drop something. When I fuck up, I could get myself killed." Matt drained his beer. "I can't protect myself anymore and it scares the shit out of me."

“I know," Misty said more gently. "Let me call Colleen for you. I know she'd love to see you start coming back to the dojo again. Nothing got me back in the game better than learning how to fight again.”

“You had a game to get back to,” Matt said. “Is it too early for something stronger than beer?”

“You find your way to the bar, you can buy anything you want. I’m not your mom,” Misty said. “But you’re not going to find what you need in a glass. You know that, right?”

“I do,” Matt said, settling for another Solo cup of now-warm Budweiser and raising it in her direction. “But it does have a way of making the unpleasantness a little less…unpleasant.”

“So that’s your play?” Misty asked. “You're going to Jessica Jones your way through life?”

“No,” Matt said. “And I’m not—I swear to God I’m not—just spending my days inside a bottle of scotch. But am I drinking more? Sure. Am I drinking too much? I don’t know. Probably. I hate being like this,” Matt admitted. “I just—really fucking hate it.”

“I know,” Misty said. “But here we are, anyway.”

They stayed at Josie’s until the happy hour crowd grew too loud they had to shout. They went to a pizza place around the corner for dinner before Misty dropped Matt off at his apartment building around seven.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“A little, yeah,” he said, surprised to discover that it was true. “Thank you.”

“This time next week work for you?” Misty asked, pecking him on the cheek. “You might as well say yes because I’m coming by whether you want me to or not.”

* * *

One day toward the end of September he was making his way to confession when a vaguely familiar voice called his name.

“Hey, Mr. Murdock!” Mister—a client, then. A young man, Spanish accent. He searched his memory for likely candidates, but there were almost a dozen to choose from this year alone. “It’s Dominic Levya,” the man said, coming closer. “You helped me with the paperwork to open my tattoo parlor.”

Ding. Matt turned toward him and held out his hand. “How are you, Dominic?”

“I just opened last week, man,” he said, taking Matt’s hand and shaking it enthusiastically. Matt could hear the smile in his voice and found himself smiling too. “It’s right here. You got some time? Come inside, I’ll give you a tour.”

Matt shrugged. Perhaps he could use some good news. “Sure.”

Dominic led him into a small storefront that still smelled like fresh paint and cut wood, but also antiseptic and rubber gloves and new vinyl. There was a sharp, steady buzz coming from the left-hand side of the shop. “Over there is my partner, Rachel. She’s with a client right now. You remember Rachel, right?”

He didn’t, but he nodded politely toward the buzzing. “Of course. Sounds like you’ve already got some business.”

“What about you, Mr. Murdock?” she said. “Some ink on the house?”

Matt laughed, but Dominic elbowed him. “Why not? I’ll pick you out something nice, I promise. What about a nice cross, huh? You’re Catholic, right? You look Catholic.”

“Very Catholic, yes.” Matt said, and found, to his surprise, he could not quite bring himself to say no. It had been a joke, only mildly at his expense, he was sure, and yet the idea already had its claws in him. He wanted to mark this change in his life. All the grief and rage and loss, not to mention a ferociously self-indulgent feeling of sacrifice.

Yes, a cross he could not even see seemed like just the right symbol for what he was feeling right now.

“What the hell,” he said.

Dominic hooted with delight. “For real?”

“Why not?” Matt said, more cavalierly than he felt. “But pick something good, okay?”

“I won’t let you down, Mr. M.”

As he lay on the padded table, his left hand tucked under his head so Dominic could etch a large, intricate Celtic cross into the tender skin of his inner upper arm, he was flooded with the echo of a memory of his life before everything changed. The needle hurt, but more than that, the pain was intoxicating. He had not FELT this much, or this intensely, since June, and oh, had he missed it.

* * *

That night he half-lay on the couch, listening to a Mets game and drinking beer, occasionally pressing the cool bottle against the bandage sealing in a film of antibiotic ointment against the new tattoo.

Only now had it occurred to him to wonder what Peter would think of it. He’d gone the better part of a day without thinking of him—no, days, he realized—and he wondered what that meant. Was it normal, after nearly a month apart?

He drained the beer and slid his hand down into his boxers experimentally. His desire had plummeted since he got home, though whether that was because he was less sensitive now or simply feeling the effects of the prolonged stress of the last few months, he didn’t know. But he’d not felt a single urge since Peter left three weeks before, he realized, and decided it was time to take stock.

He fixed Peter in his mind, the heat of his breath against Matt’s mouth, the dry brush of his lips against Matt’s neck, working its way down to the hollow of his collarbone, the damp tickle of his tongue running down Matt’s belly—something Pete did with delicious, agonizing slowness--and then kissing each thigh before taking his balls gently in his mouth, tonguing them in turn before releasing them to take Matt’s cock into his mouth.

Slowly, painfully, Matt managed to convince his body to respond, and then it was over almost as soon as it began—little more than an unsatisfying pop of release that left him feeling no better than before. Worse, actually, because Peter’s blowjobs were like catnip to him. They never failed. Even the memory of them. And yet.

“Fuck.” Was there nowhere he was not broken?

He cleaned himself up and began to pace. This could not continue, whatever ‘this’ was—this stasis, this isolation, this cycle of aimless wanderings around the neighborhood, as though if he could just walk enough, the fog would lift and the world would become clear again.

He made his way carefully over to the broken bookshelf and began to separate the books from the wood. Then he filled a plastic garbage bag with the smaller pieces and wrapped the bigger planks with duct tape and took them down to the dumpster. Then he swept up the splinters and threw those away, and finally he set himself to putting the books back in order.

It was slow, methodical work, checking the title of each book, then making sure all the volumes of each book were together and in order, then stacking them in organized towers along the wall until he could replace the shelves. But he ordered a pizza and put on some music and eventually, two hours later, he had restored some semblance of order to that part of the room.

Finally, when he was happy enough with the result, he rocked back and stretched his legs, cramped and tight from kneeling for so long. As the blood returned to his feet, he reached over to the stacks and ran his fingers over the spines of the books, not so much to check his work as to appreciate a job well done.

 

 _Get up, Matty,_ his father said. _Time to go to work._

* * *

Two days later, on a cool, drizzly Monday morning in early October, Matt put on a suit for the first time since June—his clothes were looser now—and went to his office. The door was locked; he fumbled for his keys, suddenly forgetting which one he needed and having to try them all; and then he heard Karen’s step on the stair.

“Good morning counselor,” she said softly, squeezing his shoulder.

A week later, they had their first case. It was a simple one—a rent dispute over unfinished repairs—and it was quickly settled by a sternly-worded letter on legal letterhead, but soon enough word got out that Murdock Law was back in business.

He stuck with small, civil matters at first—the wills and powers of attorney and no-fault divorces that were the firm’s bread and butter—and then worked his way back up to workman’s comp claims and insurance appeals. Still, the reentry was rocky. He worked more slowly now—he still could not read Braille nearly as quickly as he had before—and he was making a lot more mistakes. Karen cleaned up after him as best she could, but he still missed filings, accidentally submitted incomplete paperwork, overlooked loopholes, and failed to spot inconsistencies in depositions. So far the damage had not been too severe, but he knew that if he couldn’t get back up to speed fast, it was only a matter of time before he caused real harm to a client.

It probably didn’t help that he was mildly hungover more days than not—Karen had dinged him for it more than once—but the sweet burn of an excellent scotch was one of the few pleasures that seemed left to him. 

He continued to meet Misty once a week or so—for coffee, now that she realized how much he was drinking—and that helped some. It was nice, he realized, to be able to share his little victories with someone who actually got how hard-won they could be, even if they didn’t have the same challenges. It was her, not Karen, that he told first about the first subway ride he took alone, the first meal he cooked for himself, the first time he asked for help getting around some sidewalk construction without feeling like a complete failure. Other times he would lose an hour or more on the small upright piano that Frank had liberated from the abandoned stock in his building and brought over early one Saturday morning without warning. Wrestling it into the freight elevator and then trying to get it down the hall and around the tight corner into his apartment had made for a miserable morning for them both, but he had to admit that it was nice to have something new to fill the time with.

In late October he returned to court for the first time since May. It was a simple matter—he was arguing for a restraining order for a woman whose former co-worker didn’t know how to take no for an answer. He felt sick the entire time, partly because he was hungover and completely disoriented in the courtroom, but mostly because he knew how easily these orders could be violated, and how little he could do about that now. But he prevailed, the order was signed, and his client went home and, he hoped, got a good night’s sleep for the first time in over a year.

To his surprise, Karen accepted his invitation for a celebratory drink afterward, instead of lecturing him. He didn’t dare ask why—just going out and being in the world again felt like a treat.

Josie’s being closed for yet another health code violation, she recommended a new cocktail lounge that had opened earlier that summer next door to the Hilton around the corner from his apartment.

It was Thursday night and already filling up, but they found seats at the bar and were soon toasting to victory with one extremely expensive martini (Karen) and one shockingly expensive scotch (Matt).

“Well done, sir,” Karen said, tapping her glass against his. “You worked hard for that.”

Matt tilted his head in agreement and took another sip of the scotch. “Feels good to be back.”

“Damn right.” Karen pressed her knee against Matt’s. “You should call Peter. Tell him about it.”

So that was it. “You tell him. I heard you talking to him when I came back from lunch the other day,” he said.

“We have talked twice,” Karen said. “I let him know you were back at work, and then he called last week out of the blue just to see how you were doing. I wasn’t just going to hang up on him. He misses you.”

Matt shook his head. “I said three months, Karen. It’s been two.”

“And some change, by my count,” Karen said.

“I don’t want to talk about this tonight,” Matt said. “Please.”

“I don’t understand what you’re doing, Matt. I really don’t.”

“The good news is that you don’t have to,” Matt said. “So.”

Karen changed the subject after that, but the damage was done—they were both feeling sour and defensive and Karen left after she finished her first drink.

Matt didn’t.

* * *

He awoke with a murderous headache and no memory of coming home. His phone was chirping with a missed call from Karen—it was after nine—and he texted her to tell her to reschedule his morning appointments.

He stumbled into the kitchen to start the coffee and slug almost a quart of water, then wrapped his hands and attacked the heavy bag in an attempt to sweat the leftover scotch out of his system. He was slow this morning, and weak, and his lungs burned, but he didn’t let himself stop until his arms began to shake.

There had been a cigarette, he remembered suddenly, offered by a girl who had taken Karen’s seat after she left. He hadn’t had a cigarette since college, but he was feeling loose and careless by then, and he’d tucked his hand into her elbow and followed her outside for a smoke without a second thought. Her name had been Lauren, he though, or perhaps Lily. No—Lulu. Whatever, it had been a name. She had a delicious British accent and was out with some girlfriends celebrating something. A bachelorette party, he remembered—she had called it a “hen party.” He couldn’t remember if Lulu or Lily or Lauren had been a bridesmaid or the bride, but he did remember that all her friends seemed very excited that he was talking to her. Perhaps she was just plainer or heavier than the magazines said was beautiful, and they were glad she had someone was paying attention to her. He didn’t much care. 

Regardless of what the magazines thought about her, she was fizzy and flirtatious, effortlessly captivating him with a string of charming, funny stories about her job as a chef at a posh restaurant in Chelsea. Restaurant kitchens, he learned, were insane. Positively bananas, sinkholes of curse words and depravity. Her fingers had been burned so many times she barely had fingerprints on some of them. She took his hand and traced his fingers along a thick burn scar that cut diagonally across the inside of her left forearm from her wrist halfway to her elbow. Feeling bold, he kissed the scarred wrist and she laughed and took his hand and suggested they go back inside.

But she was not headed back toward the bar, he realized, and instinct told him she was seeking out somewhere private. He did not object. He let his hands drift down to her soft, generous hips and she laughed and placed her hands over his, wriggling her ass against him as they made their way through the crowd. Finally they reached a hallway—he assumed it led to the bathrooms—and she turned around and kissed him.

It didn’t feel nearly as wrong as he expected. In fact, it had been quite welcome. He kissed her back, and then she tilted her head and nipped his neck, harder than he would have expected. Her breasts pressed against his chest felt strangely in the way, but he didn’t care—the bite had loosened a very old, deep knot within him and he found himself utterly unconcerned with how she or anyone else categorized her body. All he wanted was this person, in this moment.

“That was saucy,” he murmured. “I liked that.”

“I’m a biter,” she said. “And you’re delicious.”

She bit him again, this time much harder, and he groaned with pleasure and wrapped his arms around her and pressed his pelvis against hers, suddenly so hard he could barely stand. Shocked by the flood of long-lost sensation, he slipped a hand up her skirt and beneath her panties to explore the slick tender cleft and lightly tickling her desire-swollen clit. 

“Wait,” she murmured, and trying the bathroom doors until she found one unlocked, and they tumbled inside, hiking up skirts and unbuckling belts, nearly dying of anticipation as she rolled the condom down his cock. He pressed her against the wall and lifted her onto him—he was still plenty strong enough to hold her without tiring—and fucking her until she collapsed laughing into his arms.

“That was FUN, darling,” she said breathlessly as she cleaned herself up at the sink. Once she was satisfied that she had repaired most of the damage she turned to Matt and smoothed his shirt and hair and then pecked him chastely on the cheek.

They’d gone back to the bar after that, but then the night became a blur. There had been more drinks and a lot of rather annoying female attention from her friends, veering from flirtatious to solicitous to invasive and back. Apparently being blind made him very interesting to these girls, even though he was certain he had not contributed anything particularly scintillating to the conversation. Eventually the girls left, though, because he remembered drinking alone after the bar had quieted to a dull roar, and then he really didn’t remember anything at all after that.

He wasn’t sure which made him queasier, the anonymous bathroom fuck or the hangover, but he cut his workout short to vomit in the bathroom and then run a very long, hot shower. Then, as if the morning couldn’t have gotten worse, he grabbed Peter’s shampoo by mistake and the scent almost knocked him over with grief.

“Shit.” He leaned against the shower wall and let the near-scalding water beat against his back. _What have I done? What have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done what have I done?_

Eventually the water began to run cool and he quickly finished washing, then, coffee in hand, paced his apartment in his towel as he tried to calm his mind.

It was impossible to take Pete back now, obviously. Infidelity had been one of their agreed-upon dealbreakers, and he’d broken it quite soundly. That Pete might not feel as betrayed by a woman didn’t matter, because fucking this English girl had been just as fun as fucking him.

Eventually he forced himself to eat some breakfast, get dressed, and head into the office. Despite the workout and the shower, he still thought he smelled like booze, and hoped that he would be able to get through the rest of the day without speaking to a client face-to-face.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Karen said sarcastically, which told him there weren’t any clients waiting, thank God. Then: “What happened to your neck?”

His hand flew to the bite. Sure enough, the skin was a little tender and swollen, and he wondered how badly bruised it was.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbled, and quickly moved toward his office. But Karen wasn’t having it; she followed him in and slammed the door.

“Did Pete give you that?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Matt said.

Karen’s slap was not hard, but it caught him by surprise and he stumbled back against the desk.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Her voice was deadly quiet.

“It’s none of your business, Karen,” Matt said, rubbing his cheek. Okay, maybe she had gotten him pretty good. 

“No, Matt. I hate watching you self-destruct over what happened to you.”

“I’m not self-destructing, Karen. I’m rebuilding my life—”

“Bullshit. You’re drinking too much and not eating enough and cheating on Peter. Yeah, you're putting on a suit and coming to work most of the time, but face it--you’re a mess, Matt.”

“A, you don’t know what I did last night, and B, you don’t know what arrangement Peter and I have right now. So back the fuck off.”

Karen began to pace a little before answering. “You know what, I’m about to say something I’ll regret, so I’m going to go take a walk until I can look at you again without screaming.”

“Noted,” Matt said coldly. “Take your walk. Don’t come back till Monday.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you love the idea of a tattooed Matt Murdock as much as I do, I urge you to pour yourself a cool drink of water and check out ctimene's fantastic [Invisible Ink](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8149225), which I came across last night. The writing's exceptional. You will not be sorry. *fans self* (Yes, it was a coincidence that we had the same idea.)
> 
> Next up: Matt finally turns his boat back toward shore, and meets two very important young ladies along the way.


	13. I'll Find My Own Way Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little child shall lead him--or in this case, two. Also, Peter's three months are up.

Matt closed the office early and went home to sulk. He was exhausted and nauseated and hated himself more than he realized he could. After storming around the apartment for about half an hour in search of an adequate distraction, he settled on Miles Davis and his trusty bottle of scotch, fortunately renewed only the day before.

He tried to imagine life after Peter. Women, he knew how to meet. But men? Even in 21st century New York, that was a different world. Peter had just happened—but Matt had no idea how to move through his world without him. Apps were impossible for him to use and anyway, he fairly certain he would die if a client—or a DA, or God forbid a judge—of either gender ever found his profile. The bars Peter liked weren’t really his scene—and in any case most of them would be much too loud and crowded for him to manage by himself now.

It would serve him right if he spent the rest of his life alone. He was 43 and single and blind and halfway on his way to becoming an alcoholic and that was something that was probably good for the occasional sympathy fuck from a soft-hearted girl if he was lucky, but that was about it.

He could always become a monk and spend the rest of his life in prayer, he thought, like a medieval knight past his prime. Brother Matt, the devil-monk. 

* * *

 

He awoke to the grating screech of the front door buzzer. Whoever it was, they were insistent—he had a vague understanding that buzzer had been ringing for some time before he became fully conscious. His head felt like the event horizon of supernova collapsing in on itself, his mouth was furred with last night’s scotch, and he had no idea what time it was, but there was no sleeping through the racket, so he stumbled to the door and eventually managed to find the intercom button.

“Jesus, Matt,” Foggy said. “It’s freezing out here. Let me in.”

He was too hungover to understand what Foggy might possibly be doing in town, and had no interest in letting Fog see him like this, but he didn’t see how the weekend couldn’t get any worse, so he buzzed him through.

“Hey,” Matt said, opening the door.

“You look like shit,” Foggy said, enveloping Matt in a bear hug he didn’t anticipate.

“Feel like it too.”

“I’m worried about you, buddy,” Foggy said. “Karen called me last night.”

“I’m all right,” Matt said, stepping aside to let him in. “Want some coffee?”

“I’ll make the coffee,” Foggy said. “You take a shower.”

“Okay mom,” Matt said, but it was a good idea, so he did.

By the time he got out, the apartment was redolent of coffee, bacon, and eggs, which both smelled delicious and nauseating—but mostly delicious.

Delicious. That was new. Between the bacon and the gut twisting boner he'd popped two nights ago at the bar made him wonder if his brain had finally begun to recalibrate itself to its new normal. Certainly the power of his headache suggested his capacity for pain seemed fully restored.

He gingerly slid into a kitchen chair and waited for Foggy to bring the food to the table.

“What the fuck is that on your arm?” Foggy asked as Matt reached for his plate.

Matt realized that the bottom half of the new tattoo extended past the sleeve of his t-shirt. He pulled his sleeve up and held his arm out for Foggy to see. “Mid-life crisis,” he said, taking a bite of bacon. “I’m told it’s a cross.”

“Oh, Matt.”

“Oh, Foggy,” Matt mimicked. “Just say what you want to say.”

 “I should have come sooner.”

“No, you shouldn’t have. You have a newborn,” Matt said. “Why are you here, anyway?”

“We’re getting her baptized tomorrow, or did you forget?”

“Ah, fuck.” Matt rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry, Fog. I didn’t realize it was this week.”

“Well,” Foggy said. “It would be nice if you could get your shit together before I put the care of my daughter’s soul in your hands.”

“Fog, I’m sorry—”

“I know you are,” Foggy said. “Why do you think I’m here? I’m not going to judge you, man. I love you. Just—I don’t live here anymore. I need you to let me in.”

“What do you want me to say, Fog? That I don’t know what I’m doing anymore? That I keep waiting for things to fall into place and they never do? That maybe it would have been better if I’d just died like the rest of them?”

“Do you really believe that?”

Matt shrugged and shook his head. Then he nodded. “Sometimes.” It was a relief to say it finally. He was not okay. This was not okay. Nothing was okay.

“You fucking idiot,” Foggy said, his voice shaken. “You’re not—” he paused for a long minute. “Marcie and I have been talking, and we’re thinking about moving back. D.C. is a fucking cesspool, and we want to be closer to you.”

“No, don’t,” Matt said. “I have no plans to off myself, Fog. I swear to God. I'm just...being a gloomy bastard. Please don't uproot your family on my account.”

“You think you aren’t my family too, Matt?”

Matt shook his head and got up from the table, not at all willing to have this conversation. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do,” Foggy said evenly. “Don’t walk away from me."

Matt sat on the windowsill. “You can live wherever you want--I can’t stop you,” Matt said reluctantly.

"You know, I've been thinking a lot about your dad since Alice was born," Foggy said suddenly.

"You never met my dad."

"No, but I know what he did for you. If anything ever happened to Alice--"

"I don't need to be reminded how much it hurt my dad to see me get burned, Fog."

"Tough shit. Because now that I'm a dad, I don't know how he was ever able to get out of bed after that, much less go to work, take you to school, even so much as let you out of his sight. I don't know where he found the strength to do that, but he did. He did, and it made you stronger," Foggy said. "There is nothing I fear more than my daughter getting hurt, and it sounds crazy, but thinking about your dad is pretty much the only thing that helps me keep that fear in check."

"So, what, you're going to tell me I'm stronger than I think I am, et cetera, et cetera?"

"No. My point is, that's what makes us family, Matt. Your dad is teaching me what it means to be a dad, as much as my own dad did. My kid has me so sleep-deprived I don't even know if I'm making any sense, but just please believe me. This is why I wanted you to be her godfather instead of one of my brothers. I want a little piece of Jack Murdock looking out for her, too."

"And how do I do that now?"

“Look, you have got to stop thinking you don’t matter anymore,” Foggy said. “It was never about saving the city for me, or Karen, or Peter. That was never what we loved about you.”

Matt shook his head and shrugged. “It was what I loved about myself,” he said. “It was the best work I ever did.”

“You don’t know that,” Foggy said. “I think there’s still a lot of people out there you can save.”

“Including myself?” Matt asked wryly. 

“I mean, only if you want to be a complete dork about it.”

Matt smiled in spite of his grumpiness. "Fine, move back to the city if you want, but I'm not hiring you back, okay?"

* * *

An hour and a half later, they were on the Upper East Side, standing outside Marcie’s parents’ classic six on Lexington Avenue.

Marcie met them at the door and greeted Matt with a hug and a kiss. “You look good,” she lied, effortlessly, kindly, tucking Matt’s hand into her elbow. “She’s in here.”

Marcie walked him into what he imagined, given the neighborhood, was a richly appointed living room. At any rate, the carpet was thick beneath his feet and the sofa she directed him to sit in was covered in butter-soft leather. Marcie’s parents said hello and he nodded, but most of his attention was on the snuffling, sighing bundle that Foggy was placing into his arms.

“Watch her head,” Marcie murmured, adjusting his arm.

He had never held a baby this small—she must have weighed less than 15 pounds. He carefully touched her face, inventorying Alice’s tiny nose, ears, chin. A tiny palm smacked the side of his hand and tinier fingers closed firmly around his pinkie in a death grip that startled him.

“Hey there,” he said. “Are we arm wrestling now?”

She chirped and squirmed in response and dragged his hand down to her chest. He lay his hand flat against her, feeling her little belly rise and fall as she breathed, her tiny heart beating like a bird’s beneath his fingertips.

“She’s smiling at you,” Foggy said. “That’s your Uncle Matt, Lissie.”

Matt gently disengaged his hand from Alice’s grip and took off his sunglasses. It seemed important that she know what he looked like, that his scars and strange still eyes be as normal to his goddaughter as they were to everyone else that he loved.

Because he loved this little girl, immediately and completely. The tiny weight of her, the seemingly instinctual trust with which she had grabbed his hand and placed it on her heart had sealed some kind of permanent bond between them.

He found her little feet and she kicked delightedly against his fingers, making a happy squirmy giggle that Matt couldn’t help but smile at. He lifted her close enough to kiss her forehead, wispy with fine silken hair and breathe in the scent of her, milky and powdery and sweet, unlocking a surprisingly intense primal instinct to protect her against the world. He suddenly knew, without a doubt, that he would kill anyone who tried to hurt this child.

He reluctantly handed her back to her mother 20 minutes later, after she began to fuss, her little cries surprisingly heart-wrenching.

“She’s pretty awesome, isn’t she,” Foggy said.

“By far your best work ever,” Matt said. “You’re a lucky man, Fog.”

“Please get your shit together, Matt,” Foggy said. “I want her to be able to count on you. Please.”

“She will,” Matt promised.

* * *

Two days after the christening, Colleen met Matt at the door of her dojo. “I’m glad you called,” she said. “I’ve been hoping you would.”

“I just need to find a way to fight again.”

“I know you do,” she said, taking him into the main training space and depositing him on a thick sparring mat. He could hear the sounds of two kickboxers sparring in the ring behind him, and the unmistakable smell of sweat and chalk and gloves brought memories of his dad’s boxing gym flooding back. And for the first time in a long while, the memory made him smile.

“I thought we’d start with judo.”

“But I don’t know ju—”

Suddenly Colleen dragged him forward by his shirt, pulling him off balance, tucked her foot under his calf and sent him sprawling sideways onto the mat.

“That’s why we’re starting with it,” she said, leaning forward and grabbing his hand to help him stand. “I don’t want you comparing your performance with before. It’s better to make a fresh start.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” said a young woman’s voice, standing to his left. He felt the mat shift beneath his feet and Colleen placing the woman’s right hand in his. She must be blind too, he realized.

“I’m Araceli Machado,” she said. “We’re going to be working together.”

“Matt Murdock,” Matt said. “Where do I know your name from?”

“She won a gold medal in judo at the last Paralympics,” Colleen said.

“With a sprained foot,” Araceli said proudly. “Time magazine put me on the cover. It was a whole thing.”

“Working together?” Matt asked Colleen. “She’s going to kick my ass.”

“Probably,” Araceli said cheerfully. “But it’s the best way to learn.”

 “Araceli is learning how to coach,” Colleen said. “I told her I had the perfect student for her: old, stubborn, and angry. If she can train you, she can train anyone.”

“Hey,” Matt said. “I’m not _that_ old.”

“Enough chitchat,” Araceli said, clapping twice. "I have to leave for my accounting class in an hour, so let's get to work."

It had been a long time since Matt had had a sensei, but he fell back into the rhythm of training gratefully. Stick, asshole that he was, had taken him under his wing when he was at his most confused and terrified and angry, missing his dad and his old home, still unable to fully reconcile his blindness with the flood of sensory information that had replaced his sight but knowing instinctively that it wasn’t normal, that he could tell no one about it. Stick had taught him how to funnel his rage into the discipline of the fight, and how to use that discipline to keep his secret safe.

Now, as this teenager half his size taught him how to bow and fall and roll, he began to remember the difference between that discipline and the aimless beating against the heavy bag he’d been doing for no other reason than to exhaust himself. Discipline was what would free him, he realized. He could not control what the world put in his way, but he could control how he responded to it.   

* * *

Two weeks later, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, he arrived home to find Peter standing in the cold on the front stoop.

“Matt,” he said softly.

“Oh,” Matt said, reaching out to touch him, finding an arm. “Hey.”

“It’s been three months,” he said, and Matt realized just how much he had missed hearing his voice. But something was wrong, he could tell. “I thought we should talk.”

“Of course. Come on up.”

“Is it too cold for a walk?”

“No.” Matt’s heart began to beat more quickly than he would have liked. _He’s leaving me,_ he realized. And then: _It’s for the best._

Peter took his hand and looped it under his elbow as he always had, and they turned back up the way Matt had just come. Matt allowed himself to turn towards Peter a bit and take in his smell. Even now, with his diminished senses, it was familiar enough to cause a stir in his belly.

“Aunt May sends her love,” Peter said.

“Give her mine, when you see her,” Matt said, realizing he’d probably never tell May himself again, and finding himself surprised by how much it hurt. “I’m sorry I missed her birthday.”

“She understands,” Peter said. They walked nearly a block, simply refamiliarizing themselves with each other’s gait, before he spoke again. “I hear you’re back at work.”

Matt nodded. “Almost two months now.”

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away for long,” Peter said, briefly bumping his shoulder against Matt’s. Matt smiled in spite of his dread.

But instead Peter said, “I’ve missed you. Like, a lot.”

Matt began to laugh uncontrollably.

“What?”

“When you suggested we walk instead of going home I assumed you were going to tell me you’d met someone else,” he said.

Peter’s silence then was worse than any words he could say.

“Ah.”

“It wasn’t—” Peter closed his hand over Matt’s as he searched for the right words. “The first three or four weeks, I was okay, you know? I was giving you your space, letting you work things out the way you said you needed to, and if that was the only way I could help, then that’s what I was going to do. Karen texted a couple of times, let me know how you were doing, and that helped a lot, but then you went back to work so soon, and I don’t know--I got it into my head that you were going to end this experiment early. So I was just waiting for you to call, and I waited, and waited—” He cleared his throat and paused a moment before continuing. “So I wasn’t handling things very well, and I was at a Halloween party, and Wade was there, and—"

“And.”

“And.”

Matt nodded but didn’t let go of Peter’s arm. _What the hell._ “I fucked a woman in the bathroom of a bar about a few weeks ago.”

Peter coughed. “A woman?”

“Surprised the hell out of me too.”

“You didn’t realize?”

Matt laughed at that absurdity. “I didn’t expect to want to.”

“Oh.” Peter closed his hand over Matt’s. “Is that--what you want now?”

“I’d rather have you,” Matt said. Whether he’d lost Peter or not, there was no sense in lying.  “What do you want, Peter? Do you want to come home?”

“I want you.”

Matt curled his arm more tightly in Peter’s. “So, let’s go home, then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for hanging in while the going got rough. Your reward? A little sunshine for our heroes. -->


	14. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter remembers something Matt said on their first date. Matt rectifies an old mistake.

**June, 2019**

It was not yet noon, but the sun was already roasting as they walked the four blocks to the beach. They’d had coffee at the hotel but now they stopped at a street cart for pan de tomate, garlicky toasted bread spread thickly with crushed tomatoes, which they ate on a bench in a vest-pocket park at the end of the block.

Two days before, New York had unveiled its memorial to the Defenders on a warm morning in June on the northern border of Central Park on the anniversary of the neon factory explosion. Luke stood at the center, flanked by Jessica and Hellcat, and then Iron Fist and Daredevil. An enormous crowd showed up. The Mayor spoke, and the Borough President, and the city councilmen from each hero’s neighborhood.

But Matt had had no interest in attending his own funeral, and the week before the unveiling, Peter had surprised him with tickets to Barcelona. “On our first date, you told me you’d always wanted to go to Spain,” Peter said. “I promised myself that night I was going to take you some day.”

They spent three days in Barcelona, strolling through las Ramblas, combing the zany tactile wonderland of Park Guell, wandering through monasteries and cemeteries and cathedrals and museums, making love during siesta and dozing lazily with the Mediterranean breeze wafting into the room until the city began to reawaken around four or five for the second half of the day, lingering late over dinners that lasted past midnight.

On the evening of their third day in Spain they boarded a night train to Granada, laughing at the absurdity of sleeping in bunk beds after trying and failing to squeeze into the lower rack together. Peter fell asleep right away, as he always did, and Matt tossed and turned for an hour before getting up, as he always did when Peter wasn’t sleeping beside him. He quietly dressed and gathered his cane and the novel he’d brought with him and headed to the bar one car over. 

There was no one else in the car besides the bartender, who directed him to a seat at the bar in English—the sunburn had probably given him away—but switched back to Spanish when Matt thanked him and ordered a whisky escocés with a reasonably good Castilian accent.

“What are you reading?”

“It’s a book by Ernest Hemingway called _The Sun Also Rises_.”

“Oh, you’re an American then,” the bartender said. “Americans like to read Hemingway in Spain.”

“I suppose it’s a little cliché,” Matt allowed. “Are you much of a reader yourself?”

“Oh, yes. I studied literature at university, and as you can tell, I often have many hours to fill.”

“Why do they even keep the bar open this time of night, then?”

“Wait till you see how much the scotch costs.”

Matt laughed.

“Where in America are you from?”

“New York.”

“New York! It’s so sad about those heroes. They showed the funeral on Sky News tonight.”

“Yes, very sad,” Matt agreed.

“Did you ever meet them?”

Matt laughed. “It’s a city of almost 9 million people. The odds would be very, very small.”

“I know. It’s just that New York seems like a place where a lot of impossible things happen.”

Before Matt could respond, a small, boisterous group of old German women arrived from the opposite car. The bartender greeted them with a cheerful “Guten Abend, señoras,” and Matt turned his attention to his book and his drink.

But it was hard to concentrate, because an idea was beginning to take shape. He finished his scotch in two swallows and returned to the cabin.

Peter was still asleep. He leaned against the top bunk, his chin resting on a folded arm, as he traced Peter’s ear and neck and shoulder with his free hand, listening to the gentle half-snore he always made when he was sleeping on his left side. Peter stirred a little beneath Matt’s touch, clasping his hand and kissing it with a little grunt before drifting back to sleep.

In the morning they stashed their bags at the train station and took a taxi to the Alhambra. They strolled around the ancient Moorish citadel’s grounds for a little while, enjoying the cool rush of the fountains and the green perfume of the Generalife gardens until a woman speaking English with a heavy Castilian accent called Peter’s name.

“Who’s that?” Matt asked as they walked toward her.

“Graciela is a conservator here,” Peter said. “I first met her when I shot here for National Geographic. She’s going to give us a tour.”

“Peter!” she cried when they reached her. “You are Matthew, no?” she asked, embracing him with a quick double-kiss. “Come, come. I wear my high heels so you can hear the space better, no?” And then, with almost dizzying speed, heels be damned, they were heading up the path to the palace.

They followed Graciela through columned marble courts the size of basketball courts and richly tiled passageways, beneath intricately carved arches and ceilings dripping with lacelike detail that had taken years to construct. As she told them the story of the Nasrid dynasty, and how it had presided over a period of unprecedented—and unreplicated—religious peace and equality, she guided Matt toward the display tables on which were mounted replicas of the carvings that he could touch. “Because they were Muslim they did not believe in reproducing living figures. Instead, they carved geometric designs, like so,” she said, guiding his fingers along the filigree curves and geometrically knotted eight-point stars and tall, looping Arabic letters. She clapped loudly, so it echoed off the marble. “You hear how high the ceiling is. It is all over covered in this pattern and others,” she said.

“That’s remarkable,” Matt said. “It must be very beautiful.”

“But I show you better, if you can keep a secret,” Graciela whispered, and quickly ushered them out and down a hallway where she guided them under a rope and down another passageway that was carpeted with a rough industrial rug. Then she unlocked a gate and let them into a room that felt close and dusty.

“This room I am restoring,” she said. “It is a small room, no? We are not sure what it was used for—possibly a bedroom. Here, I must clean all the oils from your hands first.” Matt handed his cane to Peter so Graciela could swab his palms and fingers with rubbing alcohol, then dry them with a soft microfiber cloth. Then she guided him forward until his hands touched the wall.

“This is an unrestored wall, so it is okay to touch a little. Here is the tile,” she said, tracing his fingers along the pattern. “Blue and white in a star pattern, como esto. All around the room.” She let go of his hands so he could run his fingers across the expanse of the wall to get a better sense of the size of it.

Then they climbed the scaffolding erected on against the opposite wall so he could reach the marble carvings that began six feet from the floor. He walked back and forth along the 12-foot length of the scaffolding, touching as much of the wall as he could reach. Eventually he became familiar enough to recognize repeating patterns, identify larger focal pieces, and even discover a few words. “These are words we find inscribed in many rooms of the palace. This is ‘blessing,’” Graciela said of the word he was touching, then, directing his hand to another, “and here is ‘happiness.’”

Matt smiled at that.

“I divide my life into the time before I saw the Alhambra and the time since,” Graciela said as they climbed down. “I think maybe you understand why now.”

Then they to the train station for the last leg of their journey south, to Malaga and then a long taxi ride to a small village a dozen miles up the coast, finally arriving at their hotel at 11 last night.

After they finished eating their breakfast they continued on toward the sea, the gulls growing louder and more raucous the closer they drew to the docks where the fishing boats were unloading their early catches for the market.

The dock was to the right so they turned left, away from the bustle and toward a quiet stretch of beach—that there could be anywhere in the world with a quiet stretch of beach anymore!—that lay about two hundred yards past a barebones grill shack reputed to serve the best octopus on the Costa del Sol.

“Here,” Peter decided, finally. They spread the towels and stripped off their shirts and half-sprinted hand in hand toward the water.

Matt’s inventory of tattoos had grown considerably across his back and chest—a bottle of scotch for Jess, a dragon for Danny, a panther for Trish, a black hoodie for Luke, his favorite Thurgood Marshall quote—and on his left arm, stretching from his shoulder almost to his elbow, a black-and-white portrait of Jack Murdock in gloves and boxing silks that Peter had found in the trunk that contained all Matt had left of his early life. He finally understood why Peter had insisted on making backup copies of his family photos all those years ago—even if he couldn’t see them, it was enough to know that they were there, that he would have them always. He wasn’t sure if he was done forever, but he was done for now.

As the sand shifted from dry to damp to wet, Matt let go of Peter’s hand and walked forward by himself as the cold water swept up and sucked the sand away around his feet. He knelt down and felt the water rush over his hands and smiled openmouthed like a child with a new toy—it was his first time in the ocean since before he lost his sight, and suddenly he was eight again, delighting in the rush and suck of the waves against his legs. 

Matt stood again and waded in further, and when he got up to his waist he reached for Peter’s hand and in a simultaneous wordless decision they dove under the water. When they surfaced they both laughed and then Pete pulled Matt close and kissed him deeply, their mouths briny from the sea, as the waves gently buffeted them from one foot to the other.

“Thank you for this,” Matt said softly, between kisses.

“You’re welcome, my love,” Peter said, nibbling his ear.

“You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Stop talking,” Peter murmured, nipping his lower lip and working his hand down into Matt’s trunks.

“Wait,” Matt said, gripping his arm. “There’s one more thing I need to say.”

“Say it fast,” Peter said, a sly smile against Matt’s lips, not removing his hand.

“Marry me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do love a happy ending, don't you? Thank you all for reading! I hope you enjoyed it! There is (hopefully) a lot more where this came from.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Your comments and kudos give me life. Next up in this series: What Peter was up to during his and Matt’s separation. xoxo


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